Rhonda, to answer your question, my ultimate goal here is to quit my day J-O-B and work my business full-time. That would be impossible for me as a single person to do if I didn't charge at least what's showing on my website. I could never manage it on what's showing on yours. When I set my rates, I listened to the same advice from this forum that you are reading. That helped.

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Stacey B. Stahl, Owner/Virtual Assistant
CuttingEdgeVirtualAssistant.co m

I am using Firefox and it shows great!

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Charlotte

I think you did a great job on the website. It is very professional and easy to navigate. I do agree with Mary that the $40.50 should probably round up or down to make it easier...although you may have had a reasoning for it. Good Luck!

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Kimberly

Thanks for the great feedback. I'm glad the site is working in Firefox. I just need to figure out why it's not working right in Safari and Chrome.

As for the $40.50 number, it is simply a 10% reduction in my regular fees. I actually wasn't sure if I should just say "$40.00" or "$40.50 (10% discount)". I went with the one with the discount. Obviously, $.50 won't make or break me and things would be easier with the even number but don't clients like to see the word "discount" when they purchase something? I could be wrong. Thoughts?

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Stacey B. Stahl, Owner/Virtual Assistant
CuttingEdgeVirtualAssistant.co m

Stacey, I am a single mom of two children and this is my sole income. So I know where you are coming from, and believe me I could use more money. It is a struggle to get by every month, but we do get by. The bills are paid and so far we have not gone hungry.

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Rhonda Holscher, Owner
Rhonda's Virtual Office - Hire a Virtual Assistant

Rhonda, that's great to hear! I hope that I eventually get as successful as you are, with all the bills paid and food on the table. I'd love that as I do want to quit my full-time job. I just know your fees wouldn't work for me at all. It's expensive to live in South Florida! LOL

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Stacey B. Stahl, Owner/Virtual Assistant
CuttingEdgeVirtualAssistant.co m

Yes. It is. I have an aunt and cousing who live there. Been there a few times myself. Very expensive.

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Rhonda Holscher, Owner
Rhonda's Virtual Office - Hire a Virtual Assistant

OK, for anyone still playing along (LOL), I have solved my issues with the site not rendering correctly in Chrome and Safari. Apparently, the background boxes are really blank text boxes. The tech I spoke to at Yahoo Small Business had me type something in the boxes in the same color as the boxes so it wouldn't show. Apparently, Chrome and Safari won't display blank text boxes.

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Stacey B. Stahl, Owner/Virtual Assistant
CuttingEdgeVirtualAssistant.co m

Stacey,
In answer to your question about 40.00/40.50/41.00. It's not about whether or not it would make or break you. It's about how your clients perceive you and your experience. Bookkeepers do not use .50. They use round numbers. Go with $40 or $41, whichever you feel most comfortable quoting.
Mary

Originally Posted by StaceyStahl

I just hit the Publish button. Tell me what you think. www.cuttingedgevirtualassistan t.com

Because we want our sites to render across all/most major browsers, one of the top two things I do is: first run a site through the W3C Validator -> Your site came back with a lot of errors in coding and some warnings that need to be fixed.

One thing you can do to fix these in your code is run your site with "Show Source" and "Clean up Markup with HTML Tidy" checked. With Show Source you can jump to these areas after you run with this turned on to see what the explanation is for the errors and warnings so you get a better understanding as to what needs fixing. With Clean up Markup... you can also find the code that Tidy spits out and use this code in your markup in place of the error code in your markup (just be careful with any <div id...class=...> classes that show up in the new code - you shouldn't use those unless you define them elsewhere in your site - the markup without the classes will work just fine in most cases). You can use the link at the top of the page to go to "Tidy Source." Oy. I hope this made sense; it's hard to explain if one isn't familiar with coding.

The thing about having invalid code, etc. is that not all browsers are "intuitive" enough to render sites as you would like them to (IE is a prime example and the bane of my existence , Firefox is more forgiving). Using W3C standards compliant code will alleviate this problem.

The second thing I do is run sites through Browser Shots (choosing the browsers and OS's I want to see rendered). This will give you an idea as to how your site will look to others. There are other ways to do this, but this is the simplest. I have three different browsers installed on my computer (that doesn't account for different OS's though), but it does give me a general idea as I design a site. In the end I run the site through Browser Shots or a couple others to see the final outcome.

HTH a bit and didn't confuse you totally!

Great that you have your site up and running - IMHO, just some tweaks and you will be good to go.

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Jules, SunRise Virtual Solutions - WordPress Customization & XHTML/CSS Web Sites