Testing A Professional Website Before It Goes Live Really Is A Good Idea…
Wednesday, December 3, 2008Posted in: Elloras Cave, erotic romance, Fucktards R Us, It's A Long Way To Tipperary It's A Long Way To Go...
Unless of course you’re Elloras Cave.
I read over at Mrs Giggles’, that they’d had a make-over, so of course I went to have a nosy.
Well, I surfed in about six minutes ago, and I’m still waiting for the page to fully load.
Also, for some reason, the page URL is defaulting to Jasmine Jade Enterprises. According to Mrs Giggles, they may be trying to house EC, Lotus Circle, and Cerridwen Press all under one roof. I guess probably because Lotus and Cerridwen weren’t doing so great.
I like the new colours, but I’m hating the fact that there’s so much information on the home page. (Just re-checked the page, there’s just one item apparently left to load.) I’ve given myself a headache just trying to figure out what’s what.
I see that they have new and funky names for the different lines and sub-genres. Apparently ‘Aeon’ books are futuristic sci-fi. ‘Spectrum’ are gay and lesbian fiction, and ‘Moderne’ are contemps.
Surely keeping things simple would have been the best route to take? Changing the names to make them sound more interesting might seem like a good idea, but I’m guessing that most people would prefer a spade to be called a spade. I know I would.
Anyhoo, having just checked back, I’ve now got that yellow error thingy on the bottom left hand side of the page, so I guess it’s given up the ghost.
Balls to it, I have better things to do with my time. I’ll check back next week, by which time, EC should have ironed out the loading problems.
I bet their books are selling like hotcakes today. Not.
Sheesh.
Teddypig
December 3
11:30 pm
I notice they did not take my advice of using My Little Pony characters for their categories.
Toola-Roola for Highland Romance
Sweetie Belle for Southern Romance
Starsong for Sci-fi Romance
Pinkie Pie for Contemporary Romance
Rainbow Dash for GLBT Romance
Nonny
December 3
11:52 pm
Maybe they feel the need to compete with Ravenous Romance for “unique” genre/line names? ๐
… and before someone decides to flame me for that, it’s said completely tongue-in-cheek.
West
December 4
12:22 am
@ Teddypig, You…are…AWESOME. LMAO at “Rainbow Dash”. In fact, crazy gay boyfriend and I are now going to call him picking up guys as “doing the rainbow dash.”
Can’t even get the page to load. Mayhap they are trying to fix this? Which is a little disappointing, as I was planning to sit here and mock for a good ten minutes. I hope they don’t take that opportunity away from me.
Cassiopeia
December 4
12:40 am
I wonder why the heck they would change that? I hate the new names for the genres. I found myself deleting the book release notices I received that has those. I’m not going to go to some dead website to try to find out what genre a book is written in.
GrowlyCub
December 4
1:12 am
Well, shoot. I missed all the fun. They put up the old site again, except I’m having a sneaking suspicion this is not the most current version, but I haven’t been there in so long, I don’t know whether the ‘new’ titles really are.
Darn, would have loved to mock EC for a bit. Nobody wants me to have any fun today, grumble.
West
December 4
1:16 am
Growly, I’m with you. It does seem to be a conspiracy against exercising our mockery muscles, doesn’t it?
vanessa jaye
December 4
1:23 am
I thought it was just me/my pc.
I’d just read the free Thanksgiving ebook by Sierra Dafoe over on the Samhellion site (the story is a hoot, if you’ve got a few minutes, go and read it!) and decided to check out her backlist. She has a couple of stories out with Ellora, so I hopped over there, but holy crap the site just hung, and hung, and hung, then appeared on screen in patches, I just finally gave up.
I couldn’t figure out the categories/icons, either. For me, as a reader, they’re just a barrier between what I want and my money.
http://www.thesamhellion.com/ebooks.htm
Mary Winter
December 4
7:04 am
*pets her Rainbow Dash and her Moonlight and Melody and all the other My Little Ponys on her shelf.*
LMAO @ Teddypig. ๐ I suspect Hasbro would be all over those Trademarks though.
*makes note to check McDonald’s website to see when they’re offering My Little Pony Happy Meals again*
MomOf2
December 4
8:00 am
Their books probably are selling like hotcakes because theyโre having a HUGE sale, but their website sucks. It took me over two hours to place my order. Not only are the pages loading ridiculously slow (and I have high speed internet), every time Iโd add a book to the shopping cart, it would remove two that were already there. By the time I was done, I was cussing.
Dorothy Mantooth
December 4
10:37 am
There was apparently a bandwith problem, which they’re working on fixing now, just FYI. It should be back in order in the next few days, so hopefully you won’t have problems then–they have, as was pointed out, reinstated the old site for the time being. Once the bandwith thing is fixed it will (so we are told) run even faster and better etc. etc, just like the Six Million Dollar Man.
But oh man, do I hate the new site and the stupid new names for the lines. HATE. I was always proud of the fact that I was with a publisher who didn’t feel the need to give their categories twee and silly euphemistic names (like Ravenous, with their tacky naked people and incredibly difficult-to-navigate site, lol Nonny).
At least it has hovertext; if you hold your cursor over the line names it will tell you what the line actually is. But still. I hate it. And I hate that I have to go into my website and update all my freaking links, and back in my blog and fix all those damn links, and it just sucks and I don’t understand why they did this. If it ain’t broke…ugh.
Vanessa…Sierra is awesome, isn’t she? I adore her. ๐
Lynne Connolly
December 4
3:55 pm
I love the new lines, more descriptive, and less sex orientated. The warnings are still there, if you’re looking for a hot menage, or conversely, want to avoid hot menages.
And it means the writers at EC are less pressured to write up to a certain level of hotness. Believe it or not (shock, horror G), some of them were.
The site has actually been there for months, and worked well until the announcement was made and the bandwidth knocked sideways in the rush. Not EC, or the designer, but the server’s fault. Anyone would think people had it in for Ellora’s Cave. As if(G)!
Dorothy Mantooth
December 4
4:19 pm
Lynne, how the fuck is “Twilight” more descriptive than “Vampire”? How the fuck is “Fusion” more descriptive than “Menage”? In what fucking language are any of the new line names “more descriptive”?
FFS.
Teddypig
December 4
4:37 pm
Not EC, or the designer, but the serverโs fault.
Um, no you cannot place blame on a webserver for the idiots not knowing how to run one properly. There are ways to tell what your traffic volume and server load is and plan for that capacity properly.
Karen Scott
December 4
6:14 pm
Lynne, I’m sorry, but I have to disagree. I realise they’re one of your publishers, but come on, those descriptions for the different lines and sub-genres are ridiculous. Vampire as a label for a sub-genre is self-explanatory, ‘Twilight’ is not. Putting an e on the word modern, doesn’t make it more descriptive, and using the word ‘Breathless’ to describe erotica is a tad amateurish. Something I would expect from e-pubs, like the now defunct Venus Press.
Being creative doesn’t always mean changing things round so much that they’re unrecognisable to one’s target market.
Let the creativity happen in the books, and leave the sub-genre descriptions the fuck alone, I say.
Lauren Dane
December 4
9:14 pm
I’m not a fan of the new line names. I like it simple and I think readers do too – Paranormal, Contemporary, Gay/Lesbian, Historical, Fantasy – I don’t think having names like Twilight and Xanadu make it easier for readers to find books, in fact I think it makes it harder.
The category names have nothing to do with levels of hotness – it’s simpy an indicator of genre. The content descriptions are still there. Essentially it’s just changed from paranormal to twilight – that’s not helpful, IMO. I also think the new bands at the top of the paperbacks mar the covers when books make it into print.
However, there IS a rocking sale going on right now with plenty of great bargains, no matter what they call them.
K. Z. Snow
December 4
9:36 pm
I’ve always wished EC would just stop cheesing things up. First it was all that dumbass faux-Egyptian clutter (something I’ve never understood, since the real Ellora Caves are in India — no?) and now those confusing icons. Wish they’d just adopt a clean, classy, no-nonsense look. It’s entirely possible to convey sensuality without going over the top.
Lynne Connolly
December 4
9:46 pm
Here’s Patti Marks’ response:
“We have been working for a very long time to join our
http://www.ellorascave.com (ebook) site with the http://www.jasminejade.com (print, TLC and Cerridwen distribution) site. The purpose is to have a store where customers can purchase ebooks, print books,
merchandise, etc., from any of our lines or imprints in any available format – from a single shopping cart.
We started with a new store for TLC and some Cerridwen, then moved the rest of the Cerridwen and EC Print books from Ebay and all went pretty well. We then started putting up new EC ebooks on both the old and the new store. The final step was to move the old EC store
to the new site and then tweak the site with additional art and techy changes (thanks to many suggestions and emails from our loyal authors and fans who have been watching the progress).
ANYWAY. We set the date for December 1. Our wonderful authors moved their links and everything in anticipation. And we moved the ebooks over. There were a couple of slow downs, but not too bad and they were being taken care of.
Then along comes Patty to screw everything up. I have to admit my intentions were good, though. With the economy sucking as it is and reading about so many layoffs and how much less discretionary income
is available and Christmas coming up, we were trying to figure out what we could do to make things a little easier this holiday season for our readers and our authors.
As you may or may not know, we are in the process of updating all of our covers with new headers that go along with the line names for our print books. As part of this process, we need to dispose of the titles in stock that have the old headers.
So you put the two together and what do you get โ Have a huge sale with deep discounts AND pay the authors their full royalties on the books that are sold! What a great idea! We give our readers some tremendous deals (many of the titles at our cost or below), we pay the authors full royalties on them (Merry Christmas, Authors), AND
we get rid of our old inventory to make room four our updated covers! I’m not only killing two birds with one stone, I’m killing three!!
Not being the techy person of the company โ and not even thinking to consult the techy person of the company (I have absolutely no fear of flying and I totally take my cell phone and electronics for granted) – I just gave the orders over to an artsy person in the company to put the books up for sale. And she did.
Then all hell breaks loose. Our bandwidth usageapparently tripled overnight and the site started to crawl. Actually โ from what I hear from customer service is that possibly it started to go
backwards it got so bad.
So, temporarily, we had to move the ebooks back to the old site (Bless our poor wonderful authors that they have to move their links
again โ I hope they know how much we appreciate them). And I am told we are moving some stuff over to another one of our T-1 lines to speed stuff up. Anyway, hopefully my good intentions will work out in the long run.
In the meantime, please accept my humble apologies for your inconveniences and eternal gratitude for your continued support and perseverance โ and for continuing to come back and try even when we have major mess ups like we just had.
Most of all, please have a wonderful holiday season and enjoy the books!”
Anne Brighton
December 5
6:12 am
I don’t like the new site, either. The names are just plain tacky. Too much frigging overload, too cluttered. I understand a tremendous volume of sales of their print books is what caused their server to crash. More power to the authors but I pity them trying to sell their books with the website where you can’t even get into the dang thing.