Bruce In Bangkok wrote:
On Sat, 20 Dec 2008 13:09:01 -0500, Paul Oman
wrote:

Hi Guys! appreciate all the feedback and comments - no bad feelings.
Though I would explain why some of the quirks in the web site. - I love
the 'who would put a legal notice at the top of a web page' comment. The
remark could be the best Christmas present I've every got (could be
worth thousands of dollars). Here why:

(a made up - extreme case) very year or so there is some 'nut' emails
you with a leaky boat problem. You tell him to fix it with epoxy. He
buys some epoxy for $75. Next thing you hear is that you are being sued
for $50,000 because you told him to use epoxy and he did but the boat
sank and his cat died. The lawyers ask if you legal disclaimers on your
site and other legal notices that could get you off the hook. You say
yes, but they counter that the disclaimers are hard to find, easily over
looked etc. etc. Judge agrees and you lose. My disclaimers are right up
front as you pointed out - you cannot overlook them.

The legal issues involving trade over the internet are not well defined.
Issues like trademarks and meta tag usage, and selling products in
states you don't have agents in, etc. can get you in federal court. Of
course, on such stupid claims you will probably win the case, but not
until you've paid a $400 an hour lawyer for 30 hours of his time, flown
cross country with hotel and car charges while you sit in the
courthouse and your business goes down the tubes.

For your information - the legal ramifications of doing business on the
web are nasty and still subject to differing legal interp. You could
loss everything through no fault of your own.

Hope this explains a few things and the risks of internet business. Most
of you have read of the suits filed against ebay, amazon, etc. all the
time by folks trying to cash in on vague internet business rules.

Our site - epoxyproducts.com, has over 175 pages. Hard to organize that
many. Our customers range for nuclear power plants to folks wanting to
dip there fishing flies into our fumed silica.The guy with the boat
doesn't want info on how to paint his garage floor. The beginner thinks
he can buy one part epoxy in hot pink. The experienced user wants the
pricing on 30 gallons of marine epoxy. Some folks want to know why we
cannot ship a certain product to California. Industrial buyers want only
access to MSDS info.

We could be like everyone and just list products but we try to educate
folks about the products and even mention the bad aspects of our
products. Like why you might not want to use coal tar epoxy (which we
sell) even if the guy at the boatyard told you to. Yes, lots and lots of
links. Confusing, but it also puts us at the top of the search engines -
something other companies would almost kill for (and something that will
make or destroy your company).

We do try to make it easy to use the site. Page types are color coded,
there is a single page list of products and prices, a site only google
search engine, help page/index page (like in a book).

Yes, the site is funky. Folks love or hate it but it works (better to be
at the top of the search engines and lose a few customers than not be
found on the search engines, have an cookie cutter web site and a total
of three customers). The site supports my wife and I and one has to be
careful not to "kill the goose with the golden eggs" by 'fixing' the web
site to conform to the million of other web sites out there. Heck, if it
was an ordinary web site, we wouldn't be talking about it now. Maybe
having the worst site is just as productive as having the best site?

We are a mom and pop business operating out of our home in New Hampshire
- guess we also like to color outside of the box a bit too. And we're
not trying to get rich off of slick copy/ads etc. huge markups etc. -
just want to make a living and pay the electric bill and sleep well at
night. - thanks guys and Merry Christmas to everyone! -- paul oman
-----------------------------

Paul,

I have visited your site a number of times and there is a fantastic
amount of information there but, as the man said, it is poorly
organized.

I understand your reasoning, as you state above, but never the less
the site is difficult to navigate.

I suggest that one of the reasons is that you probably designed the
site and therefore you know your way around the pages blindfolded.

For what it is worth, I'd like to suggest that you have a friend,
someone who isn't intimately familiar with the site, log on and have a
look. Then listen to his comments.

I think that the overriding point is that you DO NOT want potential
customers to log onto the site and go away frustrated.

Cheers,

Bruce
(bruceinbangkokatgmaildotcom)

Put your legal disclaimers link on the top of EACH and EVERY article
page and your T&C on any page that even mentions a specific orderable
product, but for heaven's sake keep them OFF the top of the home and
index pages (you might wish to put them immediately below your company
blurb on the home page and also put them up with a check box 'I have
read and understood . . .' as part of the ordering process).

Get the Home page down to 3 or 4 screens full absolute maximum.

Loose the light coloured text on the textured background - its hard to
read and may even be illegal under your jurisdiction's disability
discrimination legalisation. Some of the pages with plain coloured
backgrounds are if possible *worse*. :-( Are you actually trying to win
an ugly website award for the publicity?

Consider adding a decent drop down menu for navigation. It can be done
in pure CSS without a shred of javascript. (Look at
http://www.grc.com for an open source, free to reuse example then at
http://splike.com/projects/cssmenu.html for a minimalist version
(albeit in butt-ugly colours so you can see which bit is which) for a
version that isn't too much work to customise to suit.) Done right they
are cross browser and cross platform compatible for all systems built
after about 2000 and useable as a page of text links on anything older.
On all modern browsers you can even get them to 'float' at the very top
of the page as you scroll down so the navigation bar is always handy.
Internet Explorer 6 users will have to scroll back up to the top though.
(I'm pretty anti-javascript because just about *all* of the major web
security scares involve it. I'm not alone . . . Also Google doesn't do
well at following Javascript links so your generally good page rankings
could suffer if you do the menu that way)

Sort out that site map, the graphic has virtually unreadable text and
isn't clickable for navigation. Put the links form site map on the same
page below it.

I'm sorry Paul, but although you have all that wonderful advice and info
there, and are so responsive here, the only way I can work with your
site is by googling it!

http://www.google.com/search?as_sitesearch=epoxyproducts.com then add
any further search terms :-(

I wouldn't have spent so long on this if I didn't think that the
technical detail on your site is a tremendous resource that deserves
better.