Wayne, I humbly submit that those of us that come directly to the BB, bypassing the PP home page are not your target audiance for Driveworks. Further more I suspect that those of us that come directly to the BB are among you best and most loyal customers. I for one, just ordered a new car cover from you without even comparing prices.

Additionally, those that have to use dialup for Internet access are further inconvenienced with the pop-under.

Pop-unders / over are a real PITA, regardless of content. I like the earlier suggestion of a one time cookie, not one per browser session. A less desireable but acceptable option mentioned was make the BB avaiable for a fee, in a manner similiar to Rennlist membership.

Not trying to be argumentative, all of us on the BB want you to be successful. Just giving you my opinion. And we all know about opinions. . . :)

Wayne,

I'm probably going to anger some folks here, but the answer to this "dilemma" seems obvious...
If someone wants to avoid pop-ups on your site, they can "pay a nominal fee" for this service". If they don't mind the pop-ups, they can just continue with the status quo.
You do need to make a living!

Keep up the good work, its definitely appreciated.

RandySmileWavy

How about this...those of you who don't mind the pop-up go on with your business and those who have pop-upaphobia go to DOWNLOAD.com and grab one of those pop-up stopper utilities.

Benefits:

1. They're free!

2. They'd allow Wayne to continue using the pop-up to attract new users to Drivewerks

3. Maybe you complainers could be posting something productive that we all may benefit from.

ANOTHER PROBLEM SOLVED!

There is in a widebody...

Wayne,

Chalk me up as another member in support of your marketing.

I know that Bandwith doesn't grow on trees and that this BBS consumes a lot of your time. Time that you could be spending on your business, rather than working so hard for us. Given, a lot of us do order parts online and that a lot of us are loyal members, but I would also be prepared to pay a small annual fee to participate.

It's your board, man. Do with it as you like. I don't think something trivial, like a pop-up is going to kill your online presence.

For the home page issue, I can make the pop-up come up once a day, instead of once a session. I'll look into this over the weekend - don't change anything quite yet...

-Wayne

Excellent compromise, Wayne!

What's all this 9 inches talk. I think it sounds painful having to lose 2 inches.

Gosh, my life is just full of compromises...

-Wayne

Okay, I added the routine so that the pop-under window only shows up once per day.

It's not going to be the DriveWerks home page each and every time, it will vary and be random as to what it pops up (will always be a Pelican Parts site)...

-Wayne

I keep getting them with evey click of a link.
PM'd you the details

Thank you, Wayne. Didn't mean to beat up on you earlier, I just hated to see this happen to my favorite site. My offer still stands to help you with the BBS in any way I can.

I also get the popup thing every click. I wouldn't mind once a day but on every click, a real pain in the a$$

I know this is nothing new, but people hate popups. The Porn and X10 people ruined it for everyone else.

Like someone else mentioned, the demographic for this forum and the DriveWerks target market don't have much of an intersection. In fact, some of the stuff on the DriveWerks site would draw scorn and ridicule if installed on my car - ie the carbon fiber fog light.

Contrary to popular opinion, internet advertising is not easy, primarily because it's been so overdone. Just about every 2-bit hack with a "Javascript for Dummies' book has been out there trying to come up with newer more obtrusive ways to get you to look at their stuff, but with no real evidence showing that the medium works. It doesn't. Hits are not dollars. The marketing clowns have this idea that if you have a .000001% sucess rate then you just have to pump more eyeballs thru to bump up your sales. Sorry guys, it's not linear - never was, never will be.

The best thing you have going for you is this board. The trick will be to gently leverage that into customers for the DriveWerks site. I think a good number of the participants are already customers (I bought a bunch of stuff just this week), so in a sense you're being redundant. I think the general car/truck discussion forums are a step in the right direction.

If you can get me some "DriveWerks.com" stickers I can put on magnetic backing, I'll put them on the car when I go out to the track. How's that?

I welcome that offer Thom, but that approach probably won't work. It's one thing to see a sticker some where. It's another to log onto a web page.

I'll tweak this until I get it right. When I'm done, you guys will be asking for more! I'm actually going to make it interesting with tech tips in the pop-ups, car picture of the day, etc...

-Wayne

Thom is spot on.
 

Giving people something they didn't ask for didn't work for the Harri-Krishna (sp?) and it won't be effective here.

Pop-ups are contemptuious toward the customer.

coupons
 

How 'bout a '$pecial of the Day" on the pop-up page to add some interest :D

I think this would get me to take a look-see regularly.

Right now, it picks a random DriveWerks product page (from a list I created), only once a a day.

This should appease the pundits:

- Only once a day.
- Something different each time.

I think that I fixed the Internet Explorer 4 problem, but I won't know until I can find a machine to test it out on...

-Wayne

Thanks Wayne
 

I do not go to websites if they have popup pages, even if they are porn. And we all know how important porn is. :-)

Wayne,

Unfortunately, I can honestly say that the presence of of pop-up/under ads on the PP forums will make me want to visit here less.

It also puts you into the category of the hard seller. Which just makes me want to shop elsewhere. For instance, www.**********.com doesn't have any pop-up advertising. Granted, they don't have a forum, but it's still nice to not have to deal with someone throwing navigational roadbumps in your face.

I strongly advise you, as someone who has worked in e-commerce for years now, to put your time towards something that would return more on your time investment instead of irritating an already-sold customer base and turning off a potential one.

And if you decide to start charging for the use of the forums, please kindly don't expect me to be back, or any of my parts dollars, either. I've already spent enough money with Pelican to warrant the use of the forums.

Respectfully,