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

At 11:30 AM -0500 6/18/01, Andy Cowell wrote:
>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.

Add myself and Randy to that percentage. I can ask several other 
folks here in the Atlanta group.

>  > 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.

A bad website will not gather customers. A good website will. Both 
cost generally the same (web hosting space, sysadmins, etc). Some 
companies are still selling quite well over the web entirely. 
US-Cavalry.com probably makes as much if not more off of web sales 
than they do off of phone calls.

>  > 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).

Then do it over time. Both the Eureka site and the Geo-Hex site have 
changed little in the past two years.

>  > 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

The Learning curve is not that steep. If you can use a computer, you 
can get it right. Eureka already has some pictures. Someone figured 
it out. They had someone build the Java.

-- 
--
----------------------------------------------------------------
- Ryan Montieth Gill		 ----------	      SW1025 H -
-   Internet Technologies  --  Data Center Manager (3N &10S)   -
- ryan.gill@turner.com			 rmgill@mindspring.com -
-		   www.mindspring.com/~rmgill		       -
-	      I speak not for CNN, nor they for me	       -
----------------------------------------------------------------
- C&R-FFL -	  The gunshow loophole isn't		 - NRA -
-	     keep federal laws out of private lives	       -