A rant: Electric Tiki has my vote as possibly one of the worst eCommerce Web sites I've ever visited. Let us ignore the misspellings, even of the company name itself. But...
The home page is composed of images of the various products for sale, but does clicking on any image actually take you to the associated product? It does not. Clicking on anything takes you to a simply awful frameset. Can you find the products from this simply awful frameset? You can not. If you click on "Buy Stuff," you'll find a less-than-encouraging, albeit honest, word informing you that you're going to need lotsa patience to actually get anything you want.
But we're dealing with fan-boys (and perhaps the occasional [very]-odd fan-girl), here, so let's assume most of us keep on going into the order page, where many of the items are sold out; and some which supposedly are available have no product links; and a few, whether available or not, do. And if you click on those links, you'll finally see absolutely gorgeous miniature statues, such as this one of Underdog, which I have strong fanboy lust for (no "Sex Machine"-related jokes, please).
Interesting, Electric Tiki also produced the Bewitched Samantha Stephens Black & White Edition Maquette, of which there are supposedly a few left, but I wouldn't count on it.
And yep, I understand that Tracy Lee, owner of Electric Tiki Design, probably thinks of himself as an artiste, and not as a businessperson, - "I don't send order confirmations" - and obviously not as a Web site designer, but still, one can go to GoDaddy and build a site within minutes; or one, if one has zero confidence in his/her abilities to do so, one could go to any community college, or high school, or grammar school even, and find a kid who could whip you up a site overnight...
... or one could even hire me on a barter deal. For one Underdog and one Samantha, Terry Tracy, I'll do the job.
End of rant.
via news from me
Monday, September 12, 2005
Way cool stuff. Awful site.
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2 comments:
Actually, you had it right the first time with "Tracy" :). Sorry you hate our site, but to be honest, I do it all myself along with about 5000 other daily tasks. I've by no means labled myself an expert at web design nor do I ever expect to be one. Sure, I would love to have some uber cool pro such as yourself do it (and I'm not being funny), but doing it myself affords me lots of flexibility, such as being to update it at anytime in a few seconds. I have friends who have awesome websites but have to pay through the nose each time a new pic is added. I would much rather put my time and effort into my products (which I appreciate your kudos). I really haven't had too many compalints about it, but maybe other people are just being to nice. I do appreciate the mention however and the attention.
best,
Tracy Mark Lee
Electric Tiki Design
Hi Tracy,
Don't know whether you'll come back and look at this but in case you do, I seriously would take a look at GoDaddy or similar hosting that allows you to build and update quickly and easily pretty "uber-cool" eCommerce sites without neeeding to know HTML. If your friends are paying serious money simply to update site photographs, they're being ripped off, I'm afraid.
Bottom line I guess is that if you're doing well - which you apparently are :-)- and are happy with your site then that's what's important. Fwiw, I came in from Mark Evanier's site with the intent to buy, and within a few minutes decided not to because I was so underwhelmed with your site. "First impressions..." and all that, y'know. If I lived in L.A. I'd probably go to your studio for an "Underdog." But I wouldn't buy from your site.
Thanks for your comment, and I do think your work is beautiful. It *deserves* a good-liking site to display it.
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