Re: [OT] What makes a good miniatures web site

In message <ML-3.4.992879483.6306.books@babinga.dms.state.fl.us>, Roger
Books w
rites:
> 
> Various posts snipped.
> 
> Fact:
> 
> Many of us won't order from companies without pictures.

"Many" is not a precise term.  Please offer at least some evidence
that any significant percentage of the consumers in our hobby won't do
so.

> Fact:
> 
> If we aren't ordering it costs said company business.

You're not costing them anything, you're simply untapped revenue-- and
whether it is any significant amount or not really depends not only on
the precise definition of "many" above, but the identification of
whatever smaller subset would actually buy figures anyway (considering
issues of scale and genre), upon seeing them.  If your "many" turns
out to be a small percentage of the industry, and then only a smaller
subset of that is even interested in my ranges, and even a smaller
subset of *that*, all other things being equal, would select my range
over my competetors, we're really looking at potential insignificant
numbers-- certainly numbers that, by themselves, do not motivate me to
do my website better.

> Fact:
> 
> If you are a mini company "on the edge" this could be
> the difference between surviving and going under.

Any company "on the edge" is not going to be able to invest the time
and effort to visually catalog hundreds if not thousands of items on
their website (see below).

> It costs under $300 for a digital camera.  JPEGs can take under
> 1KByte each.

This is so simplistic that I have a hard time responding to it in a
brief manner.  You're totally discounting the time of the steep
learning curve for operating the camera, computer (do they even have
one?), and whatever you're generating the site with-- or paying
somebody, somebody other than your nephew who "made a webpage," to do
it for you.  At *BEST*, you're talking weeks of work, and thousands of
dollars, whether its paid directly from you or from actual lost
revenues because of the manufacturing and sales you could have been
doing instead.	Then there are the continued costs to update it to