Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2009-04-12 06:07:38 - Graham Ellis
You would think anyone could put a door handle on right, wouldn't you? Ah - but you might be surprised! It's so easy to make a mistake like this one - where the hand can get caught between the handle and frame as you pull the door closed.
This picture was taken of a shopfront in Salisbury on Friday. And I have an admission to make ... I have done exactly the same thing when installing a handle; it is not on a door that is ever going to be opened by customers - it's one that's well away from regular customer access and in any case locked by default.
Of course - installing door handles is a profession any you can get it wrong in all sorts of other ways too - I posted about the octopus three years ago.
And it's very much the same way with web presence - setting up a marketing site may look easy, but there are some pitfalls (and we have been through a few - I'm not claiming any sort of perfection, and I know of some issues we have ourselves). I was (and am) going to write about a couple of places that we visited in Salisbury on Friday - Cactus Jack's where we enjoyed a Mexican Buffet lunch of the sort quite unavailable in Melksham. I did a search for them when we got home, and found they they are at http://d118754.u27.hosting365.ie/cj/ (yes - really!) which isn't too memorable to me. At least if you visit http://www.cactusjacks.co.uk/ you get redirected back, but the way it's been setup, if you bookmark it and / or cut and paste the URL to a friend they get the subdirectory on the Irish hosting provider that the Mexican style company in Wiltshire has chosen ;-).
And at the tail of our day, as we wended our weary way back towards Salisbury Station, we stopped off at the Shakydog. I had never noticed it before, which turned out to not be a surprise as it had only opened that day! Cheerful crew, clearly learning the ropes and clearly overstaffed for the first day ... but I wish them well. So let's give their web site a plug. http://www.shakydogsalisbury.com/ is - alas - a holding page but at least it gives you the contact details. The .co.uk (where I would have expected to find them) appears to be registered, but parked with one of those irritating link forwarding pages on it that seem designed to obscure real sites from the search engines in the hope of getting click through revenue. I'm sure the Salisbury Shaky Dog Coffee and Milkshake team didn't intend that use of their domain.
P.S. I would eat at Cactus Jack's and drink at Shaky Dog again - the comments above relate purely to aspects of their web presence which do not effect the in store experience!
You would think anyone could put a door handle on right, wouldn't you? Ah - but you might be surprised! It's so easy to make a mistake like this one - where the hand can get caught between the handle and frame as you pull the door closed.