the proof of the pudding (sorry)

[devi]

Thank you all very much for your comments on my post about naming my freelance proofreading/editing website. It really helped clarify things for me. I think I'd got hung up on finding a memorable name and was stuck on "memorable = dramatic" (as marnameow said, "Fire! Melt! Extreme!", which made me laugh). Drama was the wrong thing to convey. If I was sending my precious novel off to an editor, I wouldn't want to feel that it was going to be hacked about by a frustrated-artist drama-queen. A very important part of proofing and editing is being sensitive to the writer's style and not imposing your own on it. venta made another piece fall into place for me with the words "brisk and businesslike".

So I took a completely different tack. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Friendly Pedant.

I've included the formatting/DTP kind of design in this site. The rest of my design - the stuff that warrants an artier approach - is going on a separate one. There'll be a copywriting page too when I've managed to dig out enough reviews of my writing.

Also: seriously, how much does Google Analytics rock? I can't stop refreshing it.

Edit: particularly interested in comments from people viewing it in Internet Explorer. I've used a bunch of online IE emulators on it, but I'm not very confident in what they've told me.

Comments

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

That is an excellent name!

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

That's a great site name!

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Cheers. It went *click* in a way that none of the others had.

[me-ves-y-sufres.livejournal.com]

Friendly Pedant is an awesome name.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Aw, thank you.

Friendly web pedantry from a chrome user

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

The 'cost?' of 'How much will your project cost?' is hidden behind the 'Get an estimate' button and the twitter feed is showing scrollbars for each item.

Re: Friendly web pedantry from a chrome user

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Ugh! Thanks for that. *adds to issues list*

[shewho.livejournal.com]

i'm using IE and it's looking good from here!

and yes, excellent choice of name.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Phew! Thanks.

[jinty]

Looks good on a brief log into IE. And looks good overall! congrats on finding the right name - I think it will work well.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Thank you! And that's a relief. Though it's a bit embarrassing that in all my worrying about IE bugs I completely forgot to test it in Chrome...

[glittertigger]

Great name. Have just has a look in IE and I think it's all there, but the right hand third of the screen is just background.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Thanks! The 'just background' thing is intentional - it's supposed to be flush with the left-hand edge of the screen. That's one of the things I've thought better of in the design process and am going to change on the next go-round - set it up so that the content is always centred.

Great site name

[tokyo-mb.livejournal.com]

Just three design comments having viewed in Chrome, FF, Safari.

1) The green boxes to change the format of the comment form are counter-intuitive (for me) in the context of the tabbed interface. Could you not either have a second (nested) set of tabs or a vertical set of tabs to change the comment form?

2) The check boxes under the text on the comment form might be better next to the text to which they relate - like a bullet point - rather than underneath.

2) (pedantic) The grain on your background image doesn't align beneath the footer. Only relevant for those with big screens, but it does look visually odd given the care that has gone into the rest of the design.

I'll either show up as Tokyo or Shibuya on Google Analytics.

Re: Great site name

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Excellent comments, thank you. I've got a pretty humungous screen and it hadn't occurred to me that for some people there would be lots of space beneath the footer. I will think about this.

[timscience.livejournal.com]

Looks OK in IE7 on default size, but layout goes a bit strange if you zoom out. Seems fine in Firefox and Chrome, but what MB said about woodgrain.

There is a lot of empty space to the right on Chrome because Chrome has no sidebar, but I would argue that this is Chrome's problem rather than yours.

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

A not especially helpful "nice"!

[lostcarpark.livejournal.com]

It took a while to load on my Android phone (probably just the crappy Irish 3G network), but looked really nice when it did. Very nice layout, and very clear presentation of the essential information.

You should consider installing VirtualBox (which I think is free) and try downloading TinyXP for a cut down Windows. You can even run a separate VM for each major version of IE.

Best of luck with the site.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I think the load time's not great in general - I'm going to go back and make the images smaller. And thank you.

Congratulations on your victory! *high five*

[geeveecatullus.livejournal.com]

I love the name!
As for IE, for looks at least I found browsershots (http://browsershots.org/) to be very useful! I did install ie4linux (http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page) a while ago, too, which was OK for quick testing.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Thank you - that's very useful.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

I really like it! Very professional :)

The font looks bold to me (Firefox 3.6.3 on Windows 7), which is a problem I've run into before - you want to set the font-family to Arial rather than Helvetica, because Firefox displays Helvetica as bold sometimes for no readily apparent reason. It is annoying.

To test in IE, download a bit of software called IETester. It's free, and it's a live browser-like simulator which can run multiple tabs in multiple versions of IE. It's completely revolutionised cross-browser testing for me.

[damiancugley.livejournal.com]

I have seen other designers sites specifying "Arial, Helvetica" rather than "Helvetica, Arial", and I guess this must be the reason.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Thank you for all this - really useful. Is it just the body text that looks bold, or is everything bolder than it should be?

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

Wow, it looks great. I'm jealous!

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Finally getting back (I'm at my mum's) to thank you for this. And I think your site is lovely. (Did you see my tweet to that effect? Basically, it said that all the freelance editors' sites I'd found were horrible, except yours.)

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

Wow, really? No, I didn't see the tweet, but thank you! My site still needs work but I'm really happy you like it.

Is your work desk really that pretty?

[damiancugley.livejournal.com]

I’m looking at it in Google Chrome on my iMac and it looks great. I love the concept of a pile of documents on a suspiciously uncluttered desk.

Just to be pedantic, I would probably have written Layout+Design rather than Layout/Design, and Adobe inDesign rather than just InDesign. Minor nit-picks make a review sound so much more authoritative.

All we need now is for one of your American contacts to tell you how it looks in an iPad. :-)

Re: Is your work desk really that pretty?

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

It is actually pretty clear at the moment, and those are actual bits of work and my actual pens - though imagine a piled-up in-tray/cubby-hole just out of sight and you'd have a more accurate picture :)

Layout plus Design rather than an ampersand?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Great choice of name.

Also your title reminded me of one of my colleagues' best sayings: the proof of the pudding is in the lap of the gods.

Hope it goes well!

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I just might adopt that. And thank you.

Friendly pedantry in reply

[jackfirecat.livejournal.com]

Looks very nice. And that's a great title.

But what's that mark-up I see? It's quite possible the ISO has moved on from when I knew it, but where's the carrots/soliduses after each mark, and full stops in circles, and colon too, are fine, but not commas or hyphens* - shld be comma with a hat to show low not high (ie not close quote)?

*(is that a hyphen - shuld have a lil hyphen mark above it in my ancient world or an n circled or m circled, and space marks...)

Proofreader I use currently is brilliant at picking up meaning issues, and having a music background he has an advantage for spotting a date may be wrong or something which other people wouldn't necessarily pick up on. And good at grammar and reading for sense. But I get frustrated that important and useful as those things are (and they should really have been picked up the copy-editor not the proofreader, but I'm grateful for him seeing them), what I really want a proofreader to do is see that SHAKESPEARE is spelt wrong in the A heading in bold large type on page 4, which he missed. Grr. And he litters the proofs with pencil queries to me rather than deciding things or writing me a list of things I need to look at, or contacting me, or the author, while he is working, if he must. The last thing I want is to have to look through all the proofs looking for his pencil queries before I return it to the typesetters.

Would you not do this?

(There's little money in it - I'm taking about 20 pages of prelims not a book, the rest being music these days. But you could add OUP to your worked-for list.)

Re: Friendly pedantry in reply

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Hmm, yes, good point. That's stripped-down, bastardised markup aimed at a novelist who'd never seen proofreading symbols before. I gave him a crib sheet with a guide to basic markup along with the first instalment, but ended up developing a sort of hybrid of official symbols and written notes as we went along. The fact that full stops were circled but commas and other punctuation weren't just confused him. Probably not the best page to have used in the design, now that you mention it.

But I think I would indeed spot the sort of things you're talking about in the OUP stuff. I could send you a three-page sample I recently did for someone else (it's a Word doc with Track Changes, plus a separate document summarising the document-wide changes and decisions I made) if you like?

[lostcarpark.livejournal.com]

I've had a look in several browsers, including IE8, and it looks fine in all of them. One little thing is that if anyone looks at it with a huge screen with their browser maximised, they get a large expanse of wood grain to the right. My preference would be for centring the content so the desktop is to either side. But that's a small thing.

I agree it's a little graphic heavy, so if you could tighten that up a little it would improve load times.

Looking at the source, one thing I note is that the title "Friendly Pedant" appears to be part of a background image, and the only place this appears in the page source is in the TITLE tag. This could put you at a disadvantage for search engines, which tend to rank page content over header tags. This seems unnecessary since the heading is in a plain font with no fancy effects. It would be better to have it as text in a H! tag, styled with CSS.

It's good that you have your name in the heading, but I'd elevate it to a H1 or H2 tag to let the search engines know it's important.

Great work.

[lostcarpark.livejournal.com]

Oh and one other thing, it might be worth registering the .co.uk domain and setting it to redirect to this site.