Over 1 Million Served On DesignandBuildwithMetal.com
By Shawn Zuver, editorial/content director
I’ve always been fascinated by numbers. As a kid – like many others I knew – I enjoyed memorizing statistics of major league baseball players. It was commonplace back then to know the won-loss records of every team in the majors, including stats for many of the individual players – especially when they were a favorite. It’s funny how some of those numbers become indelible through the years, to a point where I can still recall the batting average of the late Bobby Murcer, New York Yankees centerfielder, in 1970.
I can never remember a time when numbers of some sort haven’t occupied a great deal of my thoughts. Grade point average. Electoral college votes for Nixon in ’72. Metal building shipments. High score on Space Invaders. Metal roofing market projections. Profit statements. Golf handicap (incredibly high). Horsepower ratings. Stock market indices.
One of my favorite number obsessions was when I used to watch the signs in front of McDonald’s restaurants. I’d guess that I was just one of many folks who enjoyed tracking the millions, and eventually billions, who were listed as those “served” on the red sign between the familiar golden arches that graced the approach to every store.
Those magical McDonald’s numbers were impossible to comprehend to my young mind, and actually still are for the most part. How many people make up a million? I used to imagine what it’d be like to know 1 million people and once did the math. It was a bit discouraging to find that if I took one minute to meet each of them, it would take nearly two years of continuous handshaking and head-nodding – and no stops for rest or even a Big Mac. Clearly, 1 million was an amazing number to me as a kid and it still holds a mystical aura for many of us.
With that as a backdrop, I was very pleased to see that within the past few months we passed 1 million visits on DesignandBuildwithMetal.com. Even more gratifying is knowing that all of those visits took place without any of us having to miss a meal or a night’s sleep. And because our site is available to virtually anyone in the world, it’s humbling to see that we’ve had visitors from 233 countries and territories, representing an outreach to nearly every corner of the world.
Wherever you’ve been visiting us from - whether it’s the United States or Uzbekistan – thanks to all of you who were part of our first 1 million visits on DesignandBuildwithMetal.com. Our hope is that we can continue to provide you with interesting news, projects, product information and other content about metal construction products that will keep everyone coming back for many millions more visits in the future.
It’s also worth noting that in February we posted the 1,000th project on DesignandBuildwithMetal.com, highlighting a broad spectrum of metal construction products used for a wide range of applications. You can check out all of them in our Project Type Gallery section. For the record, if you allow six minutes to view each project, you’ll need to set aside more than 100 hours to see them all.
And for those of you who may be wondering about Bobby Murcer’s batting average in 1970, the answer is .251. Not great, but he did improve dramatically to .331 in the 1971 season when he made his first all-star team. Please note that I’m pulling those numbers from memory...if I’m wrong, I’d appreciate being afforded the delusion that I’ve remembered correctly after all these years.
Shawn Zuver is editorial/content director for DesignandBuildwithMetal.com. He has been covering the metal construction industry, including residential and non-residential construction, since 1985. To contact Shawn, call (419) 581-2051 or email shawnz@designandbuildwithmetal.com.
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