We love and worship AttoPilot, Dean Geodde and the smart team around him, but we're just thankful that they're better at UAVs than they are at the Web. The original attopilot.com website was a bit of a Flash disaster with a pdf order form and then was never updated.
Now the site is down in the worst way: it's been showing a Godaddy landing page for the past couple weeks while Dean revamps the site (Dean, please! An "under construction" page is not that hard to put up!).
Fortunately, Chris McNair has taken on the web storefront role with a new site at http://www.emtechnologiesgroup.com/. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a Flash disaster, too. There are no links on the front page that will actually take you to any products, and the closest thing, "Product Brochure", weirdly gives you this:
However, if you click around enough you'll eventually find a "Purchase Here" link at the bottom of the page and that will take you to the storefront shown at the top of this page.
It's all clearly a work in progress, and many of the images are missing or of the wrong thing (love the "Our Team" shot of clipart diversity!), so we can assume it will get better soon. Over at the Attopilot user group, Chris has asked for feedback and constructive criticism, so for starters may I suggest:
1) Kill the Flash. It's 2010--we all learned our lesson about Flash-based sites last decade. Just say no!
2) Put the product link on the home page
3) Put a redirect on attopilot.com or at least a page informing people that the company is still in business and to stay tuned for a new website.
4) Add community of some sort. Even a forum or discussion group would be better than nothing.
What do I think about the airframes? Based on what I've seen I think they're among the best in the business! (I just wish I could afford it). Seriously, I think you and Dean are the gold standard of next gen UAV gear.
If I were a pro, I'd be all over your product line (if only I could find it on the website ;-))
If he makes enough money without a website & would rather get married than banter about how to twist servo cables, so be it. It's unlikely an Attopilot website would score many points since it's closed source, uses a non standard propeller chip, non standard gyros, non standard algorithms.
Ops, I should say, I did use DIY as a plug for DIYDrones here but it meant in my case if I wanted it done right I had to do it myself...I read what I wrote and saw maybe people would think I meant the DIY store not my own. Just the spirit of I can related to Dean wanting to just do it himself because when you ask others it's often a painful frustrating thing what comes of it. Again why my hats off to Chris and Jordi for doing it so well.
Excellent points. I agree, Dean and Atto are awesome and I miss his informative posts. I've had my own share of web hosting issues and in the end went back to the DIY store. osCommerce is pretty good. Quite lacking in reporting but it's free and has a lot of community support. Dean if you want to ask me anything feel free and gladly will tell you what I have learned. Granted Chris with DIY and Jordi are the true model for the rest of us to hope to emulate/learn from. I may have my inputs for ArduPilot strategies but when it comes to advice on Marketing and promotion I consider any advice from Chris worth listening to and acting on. :)
Comments
ADXRS610 is pretty standard, no?
Showing our age Patrick
LOL (which is also last decade)
Good luck!
If I were a pro, I'd be all over your product line (if only I could find it on the website ;-))