The Tinbasher: Small Business Blog of the Day
by Brian Brown (follow me on Twitter): May 12, 2006Sheetmetal. That's the subject of today's blog from the U.K. and why not? Thanks to Business Week for pointing me to this blog.
What it is
The Tinbasher is the company blog for Tinpot Alley (Flash required) and Butler Sheetmetal, written by Paul Woodhouse in East Lancashire, England. The businesses specialize in sheet metal products and distribution and the blog represents this focus with news on the sheetmetal industry.
Features
Tons of stuff about sheet metal, sheet metal design, sheet metal products and sheet metal in the economy, plus many personal posts about Paul's life.
Favorite Post
Zintec Planters is a post showing sheet metal planting boxes ready to be painted and shipped. I like this post because it shows the company's product and part of the process of getting it to the customer.
Further Comments
You've heard me say this before...more pictures. The post I chose for my favorite was chosen in large part because it's one of the few with photos having something to do with the business.
On my laptop, the font appeared somewhat broken or pixelated. I couldn't determine what font was being used as it is controlled by a style sheet, but I'm guessing my PC doesn't have whatever font the website is designed to show. For whatever reason, the font looks bad and proves to be a strong distraction to the site.
This site is very personally-based. I would prefer reading more about the businesses and their products. However, Paul has been writing this blog a long time and has a good following, so I'm sure regular readers are accustomed to his writing style and subject choices, and I'm equally sure that's why they keep returning to the site.
Tags: tinbasher | Paul Woodhouse | sheetmetal | east lancashire | england
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Awfully kind of you to feature The Tinbasher as blog of the day. And more importantly, thanks for the constructive critique.
I fully take on board your point about more posts about what we do as a company and I'll be doing more of that from this point forward. When I started the thing it had a rather broad focus which I've always struggled to narrow down. It's one of the reasons why I'm just about to launch a blog with the newly revamped Tinpot Alley site this week. (If you could change the Tinpot Alley link to www.tinpotalley.com I'd be most grateful.) I think I've always under-emphasised the product/work related posts as I didn't just want a dull product blog. It's all about balance I suppose.
On the font front, I have to say that nobody else has ever mentioned the same problem you have and I've never noticed it on any of the computers I frequent at any of the various resolutions. I've also never seen the problem on any other Wordpress blog utilising the Lush theme. I can also assure you that no fancy fonts are being used. The stylesheet has the fonts as: font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;.
Maybe it's got something to do with the ajax thingy that changes the text size? I dunno. I'll check round again and see if it's a problem anybody else has encountered.
But, I do welcome the pointers and I also welcome a blog dedicated to small business es utilising blogs.
I'm just glad you weren't forced to focus on the UK small business blog scene as you'd have nothing to write about after a couple of weeks. ;-)
Posted by: Paul Woodhouse | May 13, 2006 at 08:17 AM
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Posted by: MillionBlogger | May 14, 2006 at 04:12 PM
MillionBlogger...looks kind of like a pyramid scheme.
Posted by: Brian Brown | May 19, 2006 at 07:07 PM
Paul, just wanted to clarify that the font issue appeared on only one computer I've seen the site on. The other three computers I've used view the font just fine. Very weird.
Posted by: Brian Brown | May 19, 2006 at 07:31 PM