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Announcements - Rest of June 2004 |
6-30-2004 - Today we completed two more major projects. The first is that the last of the
important website "fixes" are finished. You should find a consistent
appearance on all pages now plus "tons" of small and large changes throughout
the site. We posted a newly designed
Manuals For Sale page that lists 300+ companies for which we have literature. From now on, we hope to be
posting more and more of our lists and be continually updating the page and
it's related pages until it's finally completed.
The second thing is that we completed the last "major pull" of duplicate
Pioneer factory original
manuals from the other property where several thousands of our manuals are
stored. For the first time ever, we finally have a good approximation of much
Pioneer stuff we have. It is 16 filing cabinet drawers. We have been for months and
are continuing to spend an ENORMOUS amount of time working on the Pioneer
stuff.
Beginning in about 1980, Pioneer began changing the format of their service
manuals and continued to make them more and more complex through the 80s and
the 90s so that they are VERY DIFFICULT to catalog
properly. When they are done and they are all posted, you will plainly see why it's been so
long in coming. We will integrate all info into one main Pioneer section as
soon as humanly possible. WE THINK THE TOTAL WILL BE
ABOUT 5000 ITEMS.
6-27-2004 - I changed the menu link which was previously called "Contact Us" to "FAQ
/Contact Us" to better reflect it's actual content and help folks to
more easily find FAQ's.
6-26-2004 - We have fine-tuned (and hopefully completed) the Our
Terms /How To Purchase section that was recently added. We have also
completely revamped (simplified) all customer communications templates (email
and various sales notifications) to reflect the
information that is finally on the website. Although we are currently still
way behind in customer communications, we know all these recent "behind-the-scenes" things (detailed below in the
6-5-2004 note) are going to work together to improve our entire operation and service
for everybody involved.
We have just one more "major thing" to accomplish before we can get 100%
back to fast responses to "ALL" customer inquiries...
and that is to transfer the massively updated lists of manuals that we have here
on our computers to the "Manuals For Sale" section of the site. I'm still
working approximately 120 hr weeks to get everything working the way we
operated before acquiring the approximately 45-50,000 additional manuals in
early spring of 2003. My intention is
to spend as much time as possible over the next few days in responding to
recent (and semi-recent) customer inquiries. If you have written and not
received a response yet, I'm really, really sorry.
It just "kills me" to not
be able to respond at least within 24 hours. My preference is a few minutes to
a few hours. "We WILL" get back to that schedule....
Hopefully, this coming week, I can turn my attention to how best to transfer
the manuals lists to the website without having huge amounts of html code
which makes for large page size and download times. I may post them "as
generated" by MS FrontPage or Office XP applications, then fine-tune and tidy them up later.
6-24-2004 - We made some additional changes to the website structure and changed the main
menu that is at the top and bottom of most pages. There is now "Our
Terms /How To Purchase" link that leads to the precise procedures to
do business with us. This should have been done two years ago. (It's been a
tough two years...)
6-22-2004 - It has been difficult for some to figure out how to purchase from us. This
was mostly due to conflicting information that has been on the site
for the past year or so. Most of that conflicting information has been
removed. Some of the existing (soon to be replaced) manuals lists may still need this correction.
6-21-2004 - As promised in the 6-5-2004 note, we have continued to make all kinds of
changes to our website since moving to our new hosting company. There has been a large amount of html "code
cleaning" to provide a much more consistent appearance from one page to
another. This will also prevent the accidental copying and perpetuating of
those problems into new pages.
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