Keith_Beef said:
Doesn't work for me, either.
Damned fools playing around with Flash and Java, more concerned with form than function....
They broke the first rule of using those sorts of mechanisms:
- always have fallback navigation that is plain HTML.
Unbeatentracks has lost a potential customer. Me.
Keith.
Thanks for the constructive criticism, though it's taken a while for me to find it. I apologise unreservedly for the offence you have clearly taken in our failure to deliver this particular method of finding out about our products.
It's difficult to get it right for everyone when they don't tell you, and we are a small privately run operation without the resources of those large retail chains & corporations that invest so heavily in electronic sales mediums (then pass on the cost to you indirectly). We do outdoors & offroad first, the website was put there originally to allow people to find out about us when it was convenient to them, not the other way around. Treating it as ecommerce or a primary advertisment for the business was an afterthought.
The unbeatentracks website has never at any time used Flash, nor will it. Java, on the other hand, is supported by the majority of workstations without any additional downloads and has been around for a long time with very few incompatibility-inducing revisions. Considering the number of customers who are using MS Explorer which has Microsoft VM installed by default, & Navigator also directly supports Java it seemed like a fairly safe approach to keeping the interface uncluttered and as a result simple, which I thought was the first rule of interface design, www notwithstanding. Even a windows 3 machine or an amiga running mosaic, with all the plugins enabled, should have been able to view the pages successfully, but clearly this is not the case. Unfortunately we don't have a bank of differently configured systems with which to test our website, we just put a feedback link on & hoped that anyone with any issues would let us know. Thankfully some have, and we have acted accordingly.
Initially whenever anyone informed us directly of the problems, we had them run the latest service releases on their browsers & verified that jvm was enabled & suddenly it worked (except for some AOL customers).
We have now relented for the main catalogue site,
www.unbeatentracks.com, and gone to the lowest common denominator - pure html, because now maybe 20 people, over the course of 2 years since the introduction of the navigation dropdown, have reported difficulties using two buttons and one single navigator control. We don't actually want ANYONE having problems. We also no longer use frames, as this raises security issues with some browser settings & isp constraints, also helpfully reported directly to us. Finally, the /john-muirden subnet is still available but not necessary to browse the products. I hope this solves any access issues.
I hope you understand that we absolutely will not compromise our customers security by providing a non-encrypted transport for communicating purchase details. If your browser does not support Java, whether by accident or otherwise, please don't try & purchase online at
www.cdcuk.net from us. There is an order form accessible from unbeatentracks.com which can be printed & faxed/posted instead. We are always happy to take phonecalls too.
We're not some faceless corporation that doesn't care about providing a service, we genuinely want to get it right and therefore we listen and take any appropriate action when given the feedback.
Thanks to everyone who recommended us, we do appreciate it & very much hope that anyone who has already purchased our products is getting good use from them. I also hope that the inaccessibility of the website is not taken as permanently representative of the products we sell by anyone without first-hand experience of those products.
Kind regards,
Edi Murphy
PS Before I forget, the potjie products sold by Anchor are supplied to them by unbeatentracks. Our online prices include P&P, theirs don't. They both work out roughly the same.
:biggthump
