| | Announcements - August 2004 |
8-16-2004 - My 79 year old mother recently required a serious abdominal surgery. Immediately afterward in the intensive care unit, she suffered a stroke. Needless to say, this is another large distraction and slows our progress. I have no idea how that will play out or for how long. But, family is more important than selling manuals. Your prayers are appreciated. Needless to say, this is a further hindrance to our project(s) completion.
8-9-2004 - We have been planning for more than a year to rework our price schedule and institute a "Price Codes" arrangement. As of today, we have instituted an across-the-board price reduction that ranges from 5% to 35%. Probably three quarters of all items are now priced 10% to 25% lower. The Price Codes link in the menu of all site pages will take you to the new Price Codes.
We are only "beginning" the process of adding these Price Codes to our lists of manuals. We will be adding the more popular ones first and ones for which we happen to have the data on hand. The balance will be done as soon as possible. You can follow our progress on this and other issues here on the Current Announcements page on the individual manuals pages. Until the project is completed, all items with no price code will be priced on request.
8-4-2004 - Since our last update, we had a MAJOR interference in further site development AND it stopped us from replying to many who wrote to us. In a nutshell... shortly before starting StereoManuals, we invested in a nice duplex adjacent to our home. In early 2003 one became vacant and needed a bit of work. Soon after, some idiots "totally trashed" the other one in only six weeks.
Due to the enormous effort being spent on the manuals business, the property sat vacant till now. We lost in excess of $12,000 for lack of time to do anything about it. This money hemorrhage had to stop, so when in the middle of July, an opportunity suddenly arose to get them both rented again, I jumped on it. I (Rick) just spent 12 - 18 hours per day doing renovations which were completed 8-2-04 and the tenants are in (Thank the Lord).
Just before diverting to being a "fix-it man", I was able to implement a "trailing breadcrumbs" navigational line on our website. It is located immediately below the main site menu on every page. For now, it functions via JavaScript and should work well for most site visitors. We hope you find it helpful.
Also, much additional progress was made on our lists of manuals database. I expect (hope) in the next few days to begin posting many more manuals lists in the new format and also a lot of the other company lists that have never been posted on the site before..
Last thing for now... If no more unexpected things interfere, I will be giving my full efforts toward replying to pricing inquiries. We have a very large backlog that developed mostly since the beginning of this year (see various entries below). I wrote an "explanation page" and posted it on our site today. I will provide a link in our "late replies" so folks can know why they didn't get a sufficiently quick answer before. Initially I wasn't going to provide any other link to it, but if you wish, you may read it on this page. |
