Ken’s Corner

Mary C. | 16 July 2004 |

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Ken’s Corner
Ken Kralick

Ken is the Design Manager at Blizzard. Ken earned a BS degree in Speech and Mass Communications from the U. Minnesota and worked as a technical writer and webmaster before joining Blizzard. Ken spends the winter telemark skiing the Aspen and Vail resorts. His summers are filled with fly fishing, motorcycle endurance rides (his longest ride is 1640 miles in 24 hours), and playing with his son, William, and dogs Sequoia and Luna.

Question: What is the quickest way to get my website updated?
Answer: The quickest way is to email us. Regardless whether you decide to email, fax, or phone, your request it will go into a queue and the first one in, is the first one out. Email provides us with easy reference to check your request later.

Question: I have text printed on my page, but the designer told me
it was a picture, what gives?
Answer: What we have there is called "Graphic Text". It’s a lot easier to make things look nifty or special in a graphic, and text is no different. Often clients want to use unique fonts that aren’t installed on many people’s computers. By placing the text in a graphic, we can assure that anyone able to display graphics can see the customers intended message. Google, however, cannot read the graphic text, and therefore the text — and perhaps your page — will not show up in search engines. Due to this limitation, it’s not a good idea to do your entire page in graphic text.

Question: My changes aren’t showing up on my page, what is going on?
Answer: As far as changes not showing up on the page — there are a lot of potential reasons for this, and all of them involve an ISP cacheing your website. This is a bit of a ploy by your ISP, for which AOL is particularly notorious. In order to save money on its "bandwidth" (Internet connection) bill, AOL "caches" (stores) copies of non-AOL web pages on its own AOL computers. This is done so that when an AOL customer wants to go to a non-AOL web site like your B&B website at Blizzard Internet, AOL can supply the need without making a separate, bandwidth-consuming trip to the non-AOL computers of the Internet. The technical term for this procedure is "using a proxy server" and it can be a legitimate way of speeding connection to the Internet. But AOL takes advantage of its customers, rather than serving them better it skimps on the number of times it stores a particular non-AOL web page. In the case of your site, which is hosted by Blizzard Internet, AOL sometimes fails to cache the site until an entire day after our update. Therefore, we may complete your change immediately after you send the request. However, as an AOL customer, you may not see the change for a day or more after the update is made.