They could switch the url over to this new site and make it THE Ellora’s Cave website they have done this before. What I am showing is the slow speeds are real (There are detailed computer books I have read out there describing every problem they are having and the reasons for it.) and those slow speeds will still be a problem causing the same complaints from their customers unless they stop arguing and fix it.

Good god I would never work for them that is insane!

Single point of FAIL!

I mean this is my blog! I don’t run a bank application from this server nor would I ever seeing how many random daytime outages I have had.

Who is going to think “Ellora’s Cave, oh I’d better type in something COMPLETELY UNRELATED IN ANY WAY!” hm?

FYI the fire that knocked you out also knocked out (one of?) the largest payment processors on the web, Authorize.net. Thousands of web merchants lost the ability to automatically take credit card orders. Some local Seattle TV and radio stations also got hit.

No consolation, I’m sure, but it was a freak event with much worse consequences than usual.

My rules for that is to keep the number of posts showing on the front page down and get rid of too many of those stupid Twitter and visitor location toys to one or two.

Anything that uses scripts or dances around flashing book covers at you will mess things up for visitors even on broadband. Stop the madness and get back to blogging.

Looks like I need to go figure out what they mean by HTML/CSS/JAva compression.

Always think about what you want to do on the front page and do only that.
Then think about the other pages you want and have them do only those tasks.

Keep it simple stupid.

For an ePublisher in my opinion that front page should be-

Simple and easily understood controls to access the major parts of the site on the left hand. Genres you are selling, your author list, defined pages on your site that do defined things,

Prominent and eye catching identification of the ePublisher at the top.

Important but informative and very brief news links for customers on the right.

Your latest offerings for sale smack dab in the middle.

At the bottom as long as the front page is small then have contact links and maybe search functions.

See where I am going? Move the higher amount of information off the page and sort it into it’s own pages. Each book should have it own page providing details and excerpts etc. Each author should have their own page listing their books and series etc. Each sub genre should have it’s own page listing the books that fit there. Each news item should have it’s own page providing details. Now find a simple way to present these links on the front page.

Now you have to take all that stuff and as simply as possible balance it by making it pretty and download ASAP and present it in as close to ten seconds as possible.
Perfect this and you will be rocking in the real world.

The size of this web page (3039314 bytes) has exceeded the maximum size of 3000000 bytes.

I take it that’s *not* good. I’ve never had any complaints from customers, but maybe we should take a second look at our design?