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

[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.