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

At 7:25 AM +1000 6/19/01, Jeremy Sadler wrote:
>  > It costs under $300 for a digital camera.	JPEGs
>>  can take under 1KByte each.
>
>And hours, and hours, and hours of time, which costs money.
>
>If you have a company with a several hundred thousand miniatures range,
how
>long do you think it will take to get _all_ the pictures on the net?
>Considering you also have to run the business, take orders, pack
orders,
>ship orders, cast new miniatures, pay the bills, eat, sleep, kiss the
>missus, pat the kids and/or animals, and perhaps once in this lifetime
get
>to have a life?

Do they have a print catalog? The process is the same. Do it all on 
Computer and you have far less work to do the next time you print a 
catalog. Had I not gone into managing computer rooms for CNN, I'd 
likely be designing web pages and working in the Desktop publishing 
industry.

Do they keep track of what figures are what? Many of the business 
systems you use for keeping track of things like that have web 
companions. How are the orders processed from the site? Do they post 
a form to a web page and then decode the flat file? Or does it go 
into the order processing system.

>Add to this of course the voracious appetite on gamers on the net for
the
>"new and latest" and thus, you have to get pictures of that too, and
that's
>the highest priority because they want to see it now, now, now, now. In
fact
>most of the time, it's yesterday.

So 10 mor figures are added this month. So we add those to the web page.

>Making a webstore that is as many things to as many people as possible
-
>works, looks good, userfriendly - takes time, more time, and even more
>time - which of course equals money, more money, and even more money.
Even
>if you're doing it on the cheap (which brings up all sorts of other
>problems). Plus if you have a web person doing it for you, THEY have
other
>things to do too (like real life, funny that).

The really neat thing about this is that many of the web hosting 
providers have the guts of e-commerce systems already built. You have 
an active server page data base that has entries. It is just a 
database. You can dump the data from a flat excel file into the 
database upload a bunch of pictures and you're done.

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