... or are incompetent.
Nowadays I avoid doing business with a company if they can't take payment by credit card or BACS transfer. If they still need to process paper cheques then they are wasting money on administration and it is symbolic of an archaic approach to business and likel;y poor service.
I understand, although a lot are doing both.
It's true that quite a number of dotcoms had untenable business models although quite a few have worked - Amazon being a classic example. In that scenario, in the U.S., Barnes and Noble was a case in point of a bricks and mortar outfit who initially refused to have anything to do with e-commerce. They lost business hand over fist. Now they have recovered somewhat, but were slow to realise the impact of the internet. In our geography, WHSmith would be an example except that their shop business has been a cockup for 20 years or more anyway.
I completely agree provided that the product or service is worth having and differentiated in other ways as well.
and go to college (or what ever), the rest content themselves with reading the makes bumph and dreaming....
You might like to ponder the words of the bloke who set up the computer system used by Scotland Yards anti 'electronic fraud' department, apparently in an interview given early this week (or possibly last week) he states that he would not give out his CC details on line even via so called secure servers as most can be hacked.
And they were the first.
And dishonest people pass it off as their own work.
Think he also mentioned this revolved around the use of Windows without a firewall.
This is madness on the Internet, a graphic example.
Too true.
"Andy Hall" wrote | I'm less bothered about GPs, although IME, they don't run | at all efficiently.
GPs are private sector under contract to the NHS.
| I am not sure what you include in public health.
Public health is things like infectious disease notification and control, mass immunisation, epidemiology etc.
Owain
More to the point, they were the fist that you remember... In the UK at least there were quite a number of other bookshops online that were here before. How many of those do you remember?
(IIRC The Internetbook Shop was quite good before it was bought by WH Smith!)
If he were thinking that through logically, then he would also never hand over a cc in a shop or resteraunt, or use it over the phone. All of the old manual processes are equally (or more) susceptable to fraud as an online transaction. Online, the transaction itself is probably more secure, however you have all the same vulberabilities after the transaction with the storing, retention, and processing of the data.
But who's firewall, client or server, if the former then his words have less impact but if it's the server side....
Silly situation. Eventually it will fail. This kind of policy is indicative that there are probably lots of other broken things in the business. Presumably they are maintaining their market position by trading on former glories or having something unique or almost unique in the market?
There is the DX system that the legal and banking organisations seem to use - I don't need to do that type of stuff though.....
":::Jerry::::" wrote | > With electronic signature on emails etc., fax is not as | > important as it was. I guess that about 1% max of my | > business communications happen by fax, if that and even | > less by postal mail. | Is any done by courier though, such as legal documents ?
Legal documents between solicitors (and some other organisations eg local councils will usually have at least one mailbox) are sent using private mail networks (Rutland Exchange/HaysDX/LegalPost). Staff take outgoing documents to the local hub (in Scotland this is known as 'ruttling') and collect incoming, and each member has their own lockable mailbox at the hub together with boxes for mail ongoing to other parts of the network, which is handled by courier. Organisations are charged for use of the exchange annually depending on their assessed use, and it is known that Royal Mail DataPost use peaks every time an assessment week for the exchange comes round :-)
I don't know if there's a special sticker on the envelope or if anyone could drop something into the system if they found a mailbox.
Owain
No, they are providing nothing special in terms of product, equal to the competition but nothing special, the point is they offer a total package. The problem is that in doing so they are tending to screw the first and last people the customer deals with. AIUI, other than a blip due to 9/11 they are still expanding - perhaps you are right, their bubble will burst.
So, out of interest, what does anybody think of my website
I would appreciate any constructive comments
In message , IMM writes
So where is your website DIMM ?
I think it is actually quite good. If I go through a list of common annoyances with web sites in general, there are none that you implement!
Positives:
It explains what the business does and what products and services you offer.
Written in clear english without excess marketing bull
It's is easy to find contact information,
Works on all browsers,
Not reliant on flash (in any sense of the word),
Pages load quickly
Navigation is simple
Colours and fonts sensibly chosen
Minor Niggles:
Images lack alternate text descriptions (but there are unlikely to be that many partially sighted boiler repair people out there - so not that much of an issue)
Since the picture can be an important part of helping someone identify a part (or at least gain reassurance they are ordering the right thing) it could do with more pictures of the products. Currently the thumbnails display mostly says "not got pictures of much really!" (I might tone down the green on the missing picture thumbnail at bit as well).
From a web deveopers perspective, I would be tempted to obscure the mailto link so that it is not so readily harvested by spam bots (most of which read the text of the site without interpreting the html) so something like:
Contact Us
should work just the same as your current contact link, but is not as readily harvested.
He can't even type english, so can you imagine what a browser would make of his html?
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