This is a  letter I wrote for someone unhappy with the site. I think it is a worthwhile read for anyone unhappy with this site:

“ Dear (unhappy customer) and others of like mind: I will try to address your post in the order you stated it. First you are dismayed that there is no longer a chat. Lot’s of people are, as a matter of fact it was the talk of the board for days. In fact the chat was just a bit of an “add on”, not really considered a part of the web site. It was written in Java, very quirky…. But I put it up so that those willing to put up with its idiosyncrasies could have one more fun thing to do. I also put a notice on the opening page to that effect. It was unmonitored and to be entered only at the users discretion. Even with all this warning, many people became quite upset with me… as if somehow they were ‘owed’ a chat. And I was inundated with complaints about it. Eventually because of abuse it finally had to be taken down…. And you know what I found out? That in the year it had been up it had received almost 10 times more activity than this BBS! And I was inundated with complaints that I took it off…. Boy there is no way to win is there. I was stunned… and very sorry it is not continuing, but that particular script just isn’t going to work anymore. There are many commercial services available that offer chat areas and you are as welcome to use those as anyone else on the web. I think it is likely that you already have installed on your computer some version of ‘Messenger’. They offer great chat services on an endless variety of subjects. I am sure they would love to have you on their mailing list.

The next part of your statement is “does anyone else hate this web site”. That is a fair question that it seems no one else has had the audacity to ask, so pat yours self on the back for being a first. But it seems this is the wrong place to ask, because if they truly hated it they wouldn’t likely be here now would they? It leads me to ask why you are here. Quite honestly I have never felt compelled to return to a website I hated... you probably overstated your feelings just a wee bit. I hope so anyway. Now of course I don't want you to leave here... all of this is for you, and for your pleasure. But did you know that according to Inktomi there are over 2 billion websites on the net? You have a great deal to choose from…. So please don’t waste your precious time here if you indeed feel like that. Do you know how long it would take to go through 2 billion web site? Yes, I know, you are interested in Whitesnake and rightly so. I just did a quick search on Yahoo using the term “Whitesnake web sites” and found 6 unique sites dedicated to Whitesnake….. within the first 20 search returns!!! So there are probably a lot more than that. Maybe that’s where all the people go that hate this site.... but I really wish you would stay.

“its so damn hard to navigate”…. Maybe it’s just because I know my way around, but I don’t find that at all…. Especially compared to the previous incarnation of this site web site. To give you a breakdown of what we were trying to accomplish I will tell you this. According to my report there a total of 5689 files on this site. Some of them are not public, but most are, and many of them are antiquated and simply need to be cleaned off the server. My guess is about half of them are active. They are mostly pictures, pages, sub-pages, script files and media files. The vast majority were put on this site before the current “horizontal” incarnation. In fact there have been only about 10 new pages added to the site, everything else is considered ‘Archived’. What I did was try to break down the pages into 4 groups: New pages which we named ‘Features’, ‘Media’ (all audio and video, of which there is a lot), ‘Archives’, which is virtually everything that was on the site before it changed looks, the ‘BBS’ which includes… the BBS, and anything else that relates directly to communicating by you and with you, and the ‘More’ section, which really doesn’t have an identity yet. 

Everything that we have to offer is in one of the four sections, and you can read them by name on the menu which is always to the left of the window where it appears. I am sure with a little more thought I could find a way to be more concise, and I think it is possible you want it broke down into smaller, more specific quantities. But that is not how it is now. And it is not only a far cry simpler that it was previously (before there was not main menu, you had to follow links within the sub pages… A bit like a maze), but it accomplishes one thing that I wanted, and I hope that it is working like I intended: you see, before I had so many pages with long loading times, during which time if you were on dial up you would have ‘dead time’… the time it takes for the page to load. Now… ideally, you can click on a link, navigate to another page in the site to enjoy while it is loading, then return to it. You can even listen to the media files while you browse the site. I think it’s cool…. Not perfect…. But cool.

I don’t get many complaints these days about it, but at first I got a HUGE amount of grief about the site scrolling horizontally instead of vertically. It completely defies the norm, and it befuddled gobs of people. Want to hear something funny? The site was designed vertically, then the ‘windows’ were moved into a horizontal position. There is no difference between this and one that would scroll vertically….. except for the direction!!! Kind of like reading a magazine, you read the text up and down, but you navigate the pages by flipping through horizontally. The internet has only been in the public for 10 years…. Not long enough to arrive at some sort of “sacred tradition” of how web pages should be built. All current browsers support this style with the possible exception of those on WebTV. Well I find it fun and interesting, that’s why I did it, and if eventually I find that people are not coming here because it scrolls horizontally I will change things. The goal of this site has always been to please, inform and entertain. We have more visitors now than ever before so something must be working right!!!

Lastly, about the use of flash: I have a feeling it will be a long time before I write another page in flash. It really is not so easy to do a good job of it, and flash itself is not suitable for writing dynamic pages… pages where the content changes regularly. I do like to visit a good flash site though, thanks to the fact that I have a fast computer and broadband. Not everyone is so lucky. So I will leave flash design to those how are so inclined and are good at it, and I will do whatever it is that I do best. I haven’t put a flash page on this site in about a year and a half. Any pages that you see in flash are a remnant of the earlier site. If you go to the archive section you will find most of the pages are in flash. The dilemma is whither to re-write those pages, or to leave them as they are. The decision is for now to leave them as they are….. they are part of the whitesnake.com legacy.

So that is how it is. But stick around and try to get used to things….. the site has gone through 3 major changes since it’s inception, always with the goal of making things better. I think it likely that it will continue to get better and better. Who knows, maybe the next incarnation of the site may read from right to left. Hey, that could be fun…. And very popular in Israel. “

Poor Albert
pooralbert@whitesnake.com