General question

[comicwiz]

Its is a great thing to see dealers listen and respond to their customers feedback and I hope it is as rewarding to you in increased sales

 

+1

 

Kudos to Bob for putting himself out there. And to all those offering very well, thought out, and constructive criticism.

 

The only thing I wanted to mention relates to the comment on static listings. It's interesting but I actually think auction formats have overstayed their welcome. Whether its the practices, or the format, I find that even sites with a heavy auction component have an "exchange" or "trading post" area where static listings can be found.

 

As for the point on percentages, I have experienced both as a buyer and seller on various "consignment" venues the 50% offer, so while I can respect people have an aversion to offering so low because it might be offensive, many consignment sites facilitate for the low-end offer and the worst that could happen is a seller refuses.

 

I quite like that Bob has an online chat component, and that he actually accepts feedback directly from his site. Based on my own experiences, the "make an offer" format helps with the kind of online listing format used on Bob's and even sites like mine. Whether you like it or not, It is amazing how big a part the "offer" format plays on eBay. The last handful of eBay purchases I made were all made using this format.

[sckao]

Corrected almost all of these.

 

Some have to be done by my web guy.

 

Again, thank you for the feedback.

 

 

 

 

No problem. (thumbs u

 

The New Arrivals link in your text content should be this URL to match your pull down menu.

 

http://www.highgradecomics.com/catalog.php?all_new=1&all_titles=1

 

Right now it's this:

 

http://www.highgradecomics.com/catalog.php?all_new=1

 

This sentence still needs a question mark. "Do you want a user friendly site that gives you the ability to make offers/buy it now on all of their inventory."

 

 

 

[blazingbob]

Done

[sckao]

If you really want to overhaul your site without making any obvious visual changes, let me know. I can send you some stuff offline. (I've been posting it online in case other people with websites have similar problems.) Your header, for example, could also be reduced in file size by about 50% without any visual loss. Your internal HTML code also has some minor issues in terms of syntax.

 

Your current header at 160k:

 

A new header at 88k:

 

This header could even be compressed more.

 

A savings of over 40% and which would reduce your overall home page size from 262k to 190k. (You could probably optimize your page to load even faster.)

 

Your load time for someone on a T1 is already under 3.5 seconds when it used to be over 10 seconds. Optimize the header and the load time will probably drop closer to 2 seconds.

 

Going from the original 750k home page to 190k would probably have people seeing a website that loads on order of 2X-3X faster. You've got the image sizes in your image code so they're coming in optimally as the borders of the images are defined when the page is loading... so that's a good thing.

 

Check your site for free by going here:

 

http://www.netmechanic.com/

 

http://www.netmechanic.com/products/HTML_Toolbox_FreeSample.shtml

 

 

 

 

[MightyBeanComics]

I had no idea you had a site...

[JmC]

Bob, I will be offering bids on your WBN 26 and 29 NMs real soon!

[Topnotchman]

Corrected almost all of these.

 

Some have to be done by my web guy.

 

Again, thank you for the feedback.

 

 

Is it OK for me to call you the Pope of high grade comic collecting?

[batman_fan]

We've implemented some of the feedback to the website.

 

Navigation bar font is larger

 

Buying tab has been renamed For Sale

 

Bid Now has been replaced with Make an Offer. A buy now button will be implemented later but for now it should clarify things a little better.

 

New Arrival default setting is now all titles on one page. You can select one title at a time using the title bar on the left. Message to view all titles on one page will appear when you do this to go back to the default setting.

 

More changes will be coming but for now this were the quickest to implement. We will be continuing to make changes.

 

Bob, what about the naked dancing girls? I thought there were going to be naked dancing girls

[c-mack]

i plan on buying from you to tell you the truth i got a few books i had deals on to see if they happen or not but then my next plan was to buy a few from your site....

 

made my buys from HGC a few days ago and i couldnt be happier with the deals i got...look forward to picking some more books up off you again

[comicwiz]

Bob, I hope you don't mind me posting this, but I wanted to take a moment to thank Shin for the netmechanic link. It allowed me to recognize and resolve an issue with OSCommerce (which I wasn't aware of until yesterday) where it doesn't optimize thumbnails (spent a few hours yesterday, and a few this morning working on the fix - for anyone running OSCommerce, I highly recommend using this add-on).

 

The changes meant shaving-off 300+ seconds of front page loading (on a 28.8 connection) and approximately 10 seconds on a T1. I had no idea that OSCommerce was just reducing the dimensions of the full-size scans, but still loading the full file size (about 150KB each) so on the front end, there was very close to 2MB of bandwidth being used just to load the 10 images in the "New Products..." area (just below the virtual long-box).

 

This fix also improved the load time on search results, and because the site is fairly image intensive due to every book listing on the site having a scan, this fix was absolutely necessary to improve overall site performance.

 

Thanks again! (thumbs u

[blazingbob]

No problem. Shin has been extremely helpful in dealing with a HTML challenged person like myself.

[sckao]

 

(thumbs u

 

 

[Green]

Awesome! Asking questions, taking criticism and making appropriate changes.

 

Offer sent.