# Is it OK to post....



## BillConnerFASTC (Mar 4, 2015)

....we have our new web site live! www.bcaworld.com. Check out link to www.controlbooth.com on Ideas page. (Hope that makes it OK.)


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## dvsDave (Mar 4, 2015)

Very nice! Those are some great pics!


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## egilson1 (Mar 4, 2015)

Looks great. Nice work Bill.


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## josh88 (Mar 5, 2015)

I've tried to check it out twice now, once after the initial post and just a moment ago, both times it wouldn't load. and isitup.org says its down. Bad timing on my part? Figured it was worth mentioning.


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## robartsd (Mar 5, 2015)

You might want to look into improving the layout for Internet Explorer (I'm looking at it in IE 9 on Windows 7). While I wouldn't recommend IE as a browser, it is very commonly the only browser availible to workers in large organizations which probably includes a significant portion of your prospective clients. Particular issues I've noticed: 1) on the team page, the second heading crowds the end of the text in the first section 2) on the pages listing portfolio projects, sometimes the project description crosses the horizontal line separating the projects. I'd ask the web design team to target IE users on Windows 7 (if you want to be really conservative you might even target the last IE version availible on Win XP - forget Vista, pretty much every IT department avoided it).


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## Jay Ashworth (Mar 5, 2015)

"Auditoria". Nice. 

You might want to change the Page Title on your homepage from "Home". Any interior pages where that got missed, too.

Another suggestion: Content is King; your traffic will come largely from search engines, and they need something to index. Your article collection would likely be that collection of content, but I don't know if Google is smart enough to index what the articles are wrapped in. If they are PDFs and contain actual text, then probably so. If not, you may -- rights permitting -- want to do something to make the text -- preferably the full text - visible to Google, et alia.

On the mechanical front, your "invalid email address" catcher is way too strict; trailing spaces trigger it even though the user can't see them, and they can be trivially trimmed off, but more importantly (to me , the regular expression which it matches against is not fully RFC-5322 compliant, to wit: it does not accept "plus-hacked" email addresses, such as:

[email protected]

The plus sign is a valid character, but triggers as invalid in your form's test; many people use this syntax -- which generally delivers through the mail system to the my.name mailbox, but preserves whatever +possiblespammer is -- to flag incoming mail so that you can see if people are leaking your address, and also to pre-flag mail for automatic foldering (I use it on mailing lists, some of which also get it wrong).

It's a minor point, but getting it wrong penalizes the smart people, which always bothers me.


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## robartsd (Mar 5, 2015)

Jay Ashworth said:


> Another suggestion: Content is King; your traffic will come largely from search engines, and they need something to index. Your article collection would likely be that collection of content, but I don't know if Google is smart enough to index what the articles are wrapped in. If they are PDFs and contain actual text, then probably so. If not, you may -- rights permitting -- want to do something to make the text -- preferably the full text - visible to Google, et alia.


The text is selectable as text in my PDF viewer, so I bet Google is smart enough to index it.


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## Jay Ashworth (Mar 5, 2015)

It appeared to me to be the return from a CGI, rather than a link; it was that I was more concerned about, & I should have said so, but my blood caffeine level has not risen out of the red for the morning yet.


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## robartsd (Mar 5, 2015)

Jay Ashworth said:


> It appeared to me to be the return from a CGI, rather than a link; it was that I was more concerned about, & I should have said so, but my blood caffeine level has not risen out of the red for the morning yet.


I see, those seem to be hosted by a service on an different domain. At least the bcaworld.com logo at the bottom of the BCA documents is hyperlinked back to the site.


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## gafftaper (Mar 5, 2015)

josh88 said:


> I've tried to check it out twice now, once after the initial post and just a moment ago, both times it wouldn't load. and isitup.org says its down. Bad timing on my part? Figured it was worth mentioning.



I've gone there three times now on different days. All three times I get a message that the site is down for less than a second, and then it does load. Weird.


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## BillConnerFASTC (Mar 5, 2015)

Thank you and keep them coming. May not get to all right away.


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## josh88 (Mar 5, 2015)

gafftaper said:


> I've gone there three times now on different days. All three times I get a message that the site is down for less than a second, and then it does load. Weird.


Mine may be something with the school network I'm on.
Took a second but it did finally load on my iPad.


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## BillConnerFASTC (Mar 5, 2015)

It has loaded pretty fast for me, and I'm remote from where it is. It was not quite there when I posted - something about DNS servers of which I know nothing.

All comments sent to webmaster. Thanks again.


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## rbalewski (Mar 6, 2015)

I usually get something similar to what happens to josh88. The first time I go there, I get a screen that says the connection was reset along with a try again button. When I hit the try again button it loads. This has happened a few times, so something is definitely unusual.


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## BillConnerFASTC (Mar 6, 2015)

OK. Site is actually at bcaworld.net and .com (and .info and .org) all redirect. I'll work on having it moved. (As it seems only logical the redirect is causing the "reload" issue)


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## Gumby (Mar 6, 2015)

*Very nice........the visuals really grab you and the site navigates nicely*................*good job*.


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## robartsd (Mar 6, 2015)

BillConnerASTC said:


> It has loaded pretty fast for me, and I'm remote from where it is. It was not quite there when I posted - something about DNS servers of which I know nothing.
> 
> All comments sent to webmaster. Thanks again.


 
DNS (domain name system) translates domain names to addresses. Most people look up addresses on a DNS server provided by their ISP (all automatically configured when you connect). As all DNS servers cache results for performance reasons it can take a day or two for changes to propagate to all servers.


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## Jay Ashworth (Mar 6, 2015)

You should never have a site answer authoritatively for more than one domain; it hoses up bookmarks. Pick one and do the others as redirects (if you must have them at all; that's a bad idea for different reasons). If you got .com, that should be your primary address.


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## BillConnerFASTC (Mar 6, 2015)

Jay Ashworth said:


> You should never have a site answer authoritatively for more than one domain; it hoses up bookmarks. Pick one and do the others as redirects (if you must have them at all; that's a bad idea for different reasons). If you got .com, that should be your primary address.


Thank you. Unfortunately I don't know what some of those terms mean. I bought the .info et all domains to stop someone else from using them, and we "built" the new site on .net as a simple way to collaborate and have a few friends (is: our wives) vet it, on different platforms in particular. Now, all domains redirect to .net and we are trying to move it to .com and have all others redirect to .com.

Personally I don't have a clue where it is or how any of that works, and it may be done by now for all I know.

But sincerely, thank you.


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## BillConnerFASTC (Mar 6, 2015)

To Jay's content is king comment, I think the text in papers and articles is easily found by search engines. 

I agree with you too, and the "ideas" page is it. We thought about a blog on projects but I'm sure I'd offend some clients - well, maybe all. Its hard when you've had a hand in designing a hundred or so theaters, seen thousands, and not done much else for over thirty years but talk and sleep theatre design - and someone with no or limited experience thinks they know more. 

Anyway, any ideas you have about what content about theatre planning and design the world is looking for would be appreciated. (Scenery and building codes, something about some recent code changes for aisles, and a reprise of auditoriums and stages and ADA are all high on my list.) 

Again, my sincere gratitude for the constructive criticism.


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## robartsd (Mar 6, 2015)

Jay Ashworth said:


> You should never have a site answer authoritatively for more than one domain; it hoses up bookmarks.


On my system they all seem to redirect properly - when I enter bcaworld.com in my address bar, it changes to bcaworld.net automatically.


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## BillConnerFASTC (Mar 6, 2015)

Interesting - it did display .com while at .net.

The email address rules is inherent limitation of software host provides for building site. We'll look for work around but not high.

We are afraid that we need help moving it from .net to .com and will address that soon. Maybe we launched to soon....


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## robartsd (Mar 6, 2015)

BillConnerASTC said:


> We thought about a blog on projects but I'm sure I'd offend some clients - well, maybe all. Its hard when you've had a hand in designing a hundred or so theaters, seen thousands, and not done much else for over thirty years but talk and sleep theatre design - and someone with no or limited experience thinks they know more.


You're probably right about blogging projects (particularly projects in progress rather than completed). However, you could use a blog format to discuss theater design issues (not referencing specific projects even if the post is inspired by one), code changes, and new technologies; with occasional posts about the company itself (celebrate an major anniversary, new web design, new partnerships, etc.). I'd target post frequency between once a week and once a month. An advantage of a blog over PDFs for content is that others are more likely to link to web pages rather than PDFs and those incoming links help your page rank.


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## flowalex999 (Mar 6, 2015)

robartsd said:


> You're probably right about blogging projects (particularly projects in progress rather than completed). However, you could use a blog format to discuss theater design issues (not referencing specific projects even if the post is inspired by one), code changes, and new technologies; with occasional posts about the company itself (celebrate an major anniversary, new web design, new partnerships, etc.). I'd target post frequency between once a week and once a month. An advantage of a blog over PDFs for content is that others are more likely to link to web pages rather than PDFs and those incoming links help your page rank.


With the pdf thing you could have a link to download them but have the text on the page for that topic. Also the site looks great. Also I will see if something happens when I connect (I will run a packet capture when I get back to my computer

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S4 Using Tapatalk


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## flowalex999 (Mar 6, 2015)

flowalex999 said:


> With the pdf thing you could have a link to download them but have the text on the page for that topic. Also the site looks great. Also I will see if something happens when I connect (I will run a packet capture when I get back to my computer
> 
> Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S4 Using Tapatalk


Nothing wrong happened when I traced the packets. Seems Like it is fine


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## Jay Ashworth (Mar 10, 2015)

Actually, I would say that it's likely that any project you're working on would provide teachable moments, whether good or bad, and that you could write useful bloggage without having to let on whose project the lesson comes from -- this is a protocol used by a number of my broadcast engineers on a Facebook group.


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## BillConnerFASTC (Mar 10, 2015)

Jay Ashworth said:


> Actually, I would say that it's likely that any project you're working on would provide teachable moments, whether good or bad, and that you could write useful bloggage without having to let on whose project the lesson comes from -- this is a protocol used by a number of my broadcast engineers on a Facebook group.


Yeah but if I'm working on ten to twenty projects at one time, chances of someone recognizing theirs seems pretty good. But I will consider the suggestion more.


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## Jay Ashworth (Mar 11, 2015)

Sure, the /client/ might. The question is whether other readers would...


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## Jay Ashworth (Mar 11, 2015)

And to be a little clearer -- now that I'm on a fullsized keyboard again  -- what I'm talking about is "so we had this particular question to answer in the design of this user's space; this was the choice we made, and here's why (and here's why it might not be the best choice for your different space)". 

Kind of the Legislative Intent section of the law.


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## BillConnerFASTC (Mar 11, 2015)

Just out of a meeting or call I'd worry about the F bombs. I just don't think I should post about current things without serious and at length consideration. People who know me and whom I asked all strongly agree.

But thank you. I appreciate your diligence and good intent.


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## robartsd (Mar 11, 2015)

BillConnerASTC said:


> Just out of a meeting or call I'd worry about the F bombs. I just don't think I should post about current things without serious and at length consideration. People who know me and whom I asked all strongly agree.


I certainly understand not wanting to write without some period of reflection. Also, blog posts don't have to be published at the same time they are authored.


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