stuff to read, apparently/april 2010

full stop

careful with that comma by the punctuation police

Don’t worry, it’s not one of those rants about stray apostrophes.

Nope, it’s more along the lines of free advice — it doesn’t happen often, so make the most of it while I fight to suppress my natural instinct to send you an invoice.

Given many of my clients now update content themselves, there are a couple of things one needs to be careful with when you create links.

First off the humble comma. Do you put a comma inside a link, like this: linkee, when it appears mid-sentence? Or outside, like this: linkee, which personally I think can look a bit odd depending on the link styling; my preference (and recommendation) these days is generally for the former.

Stop. That. Please.

The other potential glitch comes with URL links and full stops at the end of sentences (if you put full stops in the middle of sentences, you’ve got more serious problems with punctuation than I can help with).

Problem is : if the end of the sentence is a link to www.flyingsolo.co.uk.

Very often if one copies and pastes that into an email the full stop is included — in which case the link is broken when the recipient tries to click on it in the email.

Perhaps safer is to miss it out completely — I’d also contend it actually looks better without the full stop, even though that whirring sound you can hear is your old English teacher spinning in his grave. So it would look like this www.flyingsolo.co.uk

Whichever your preference, try to do it consistently throughout the site and make sure everyone updating it follows the same convention, otherwise it looks like your multiple personality disorder has resurfaced.

It’s a small thing, but God, as they say, is in the jam jar details.

I was just typing thinking…

corporate + brand identity | graphic design | website design | dog walking

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