We’ve got our new contest theme up over at our Monthly Photo Contest page, out first of the new decade. And, we decided to use it as an opportunity for you to show off your best work from the last ten years (or 5, of six months, however long you’ve been shooting, so long as you shot it by the end of December 31st, 2009). The theme is open otherwise, so don’t hold back because of subject. We want your best: your best exposed, best composed, most interesting or perfectly timed photos. We want the photos you still look at with pride. Send them on over, and if you win we’ll send you a 16×20″ print of your shot.
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Roberts Cleans Up Its Error Messages
In an attempt to communicate more clearly with you all over at Roberts Imaging I cleaned up our various info dialogs and errors to use a new more Web 2.0 styled set of message boxes. So, when you’re over there, you might see the following:
Blue boxes like this one are used for bits of information and details that are important to note but not usually sources of conflict or confusion. They’re just a friendly way of telling you a bit more about what’s going on.
This is a warning box. It’s like the box above, but urgent. In these boxes we’re telling you information that is actually pretty important to what you’re doing. Things like shipping policies, billing practices, hour changes, and other important bits of info will show up in these.
These boxes, not quite an error but different from a warning, are to let you know when things involving data input from you had an issue. These are for when you don’t fill out a form properly, so you can tell very quickly that what went wrong was just a validation error and not something with the site or your order.
This is a standard-issue error. This means that whatever you were trying to do couldn’t be done. These’ll show up if you try to do something with your account while no longer logged in, for example. Usually it means that something went wrong, but it’s at least fixable
This is the opposite of an error, obviously. If you see a green box like this one, it’s to tell you that whatever you were trying to do was finished successfully and that you can now rest easy.
And then there’s this beastie. If you’re seeing this error message, then something has gone really quite wrong. If you see this during an order, then not only did your order not get to us, but it was incapable of even being completed, and you’ll have to try again from the beginning or give us a call and we’ll see what we can do. It should be rare to see one of these, but if you do then there is probably little we can do for the error other than look into it, in the more immediate sense things are just caput, dead, fin, expired, kicked the bucket. And we apologize in advance should you ever hit one of these.
Raw Regains Ads, Attempts to Not Be Awful
Roberts Raw, trusted font of camera information and reliable source of questionable writing, isn’t entirely the altruistic endeavor it might superficially appear to be. Brace yourself, dear readers, this might come as a shock: part of its performance is evaluated on how it helps us survive as a company. There, I said it. Roberts Raw’s ongoing existence is dependent on Roberts Imaging continuing to be a successful online retailer.
I will give you all a moment to recover from your shock.
…
We good? Anyway, to help keep Raw running as the font of information and not the marketing sham we prefer it to be, we had to make a concession and we have brought advertising back. But, we have try to keep it responsible, you will now find two (rather stylish, if I have any say in it, and I do) banner ads embedded on the mainpage of the blog. And that’s it. We’re trying to be as chill about things as we can, obnoxious ads are not our way. So, if you loves you the Roberts Raw, or even if it’s just a strong like, show us the occasional support and click an ad, or go up there at the top of the page and click “shop online” and throw us some bones.
photoGooru Mock-Ups Getting Finalized
Hey all, photoGooru’s been delayed a bit by a few small fires, but it’s still coming and coming in a ‘sooner-than-later’ sorta way. Again, if you missed the press release, photoGooru is going to be our compliment to the Online Help Department, focusing on technical columns in friendly language to help people better understand the world of digital imaging. If you hadn’t noticed or haven’t voted yet, check the poll on the right to cast your vote for what content we need to prioritize.
In the meanwhile, here’re the mockups for what you can expect. Mind you, they’re tiny, but it’s something to show, right?
Cooliris implemented to massage your eyeballs with our Flickr
Did I say it was easy to embed Cooliris in a page? I did. Guess what, it’s not beneath our fearless webmaster use something sexy and free. Check our monthly photo contest page and our Flickr feed to see this slickery goodness.
If you want in-depth knowledge of how to do this head on over to the Cooliris developer forums or pester us (Derek) in the comments below.
You should also keep an eye on the Robert’s Raw footage videos on our Youtube channel. I hear rumblings from the webmaster implying that he’ll be feeding them into Cooliris as well. Ba-da-BING!
Olympus EP-1 Video Proving Difficult, Sony Alpha 230 Video Uploading
Whew. It’s the end of the day. For some reason, naturally, the audio on the EP-1 video once uploaded sounds rather similar to the Mothman communicating in morse code. The Sony Alpha 230 video (and we threw in the Alpha A330, too, and shot it with an E-P1 for even more fun) is uploading, and you’ll be able to check that on our YouTube in a moment, and I’ll post it here tomorrow morning.ew
Roberts Does Free Shipping, Video Demos
It was a quiet blog week last week, what with our editor out of the office and in the field (this’ll be the last blog interruption for the forseeable future, though). It was not, though, a quiet week for Roberts Imaging. Last week saw the redesign of our main header (which I’ve tested in IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, but if it doesn’t work for you let me know and I’ll go poke around some more), and the introduction of our first site-wide free shipping offer.
First off the bat here let’s talk about our FREE GROUND SHIPPING. As of last week, all orders placed online at Roberts Imaging for over 100 bucks qualify for free UPS ground shipping to the contiguous 48 United States. Let’s go over the important bits of that again. One is that your order has to go through our online cart. If you get a live person involved (orders via phone or in store, for example), don’t qualify for this. And, it’s only UPS Ground, it doesn’t cover items which have to ship freight (freight items are a whole different ball of wax for everyone involved). And, for now, you Alaskans and Hawaiians aren’t included. For now, at any rate. This is new territory for us, so we have to wait and see where things go. Hopefully your intense desire to order from us is now hot and bothered by the idea of free shipping and you’re no longer even reading this but are right now ordering a hot new product (how about an Olympus E-P1?) online for your free ground shipping to the contiguous 48.
Next up is the new videos menu. If you look in the upper-right of the site, in the darker menu you’ll see a link for Videos. Hovering over this will present you with a drop menu filled with short videos from the various manufacturers about a variety of different products. It’s a neat new service and one we hope to see continue to grow and expand, since everyone knows we at Roberts think show is usually better than tell in our field.
More hot updates to come.
Engadget Lists EP-1 Pre-Orders, Misses Yours Truly
So, I love me some Engadget, I do. They’re good tech bloggers (I love me some Wired, too, but they’re getting a real strange Mac/netbook/Nikon bias, and while those are all fine, it kinda slants coverage for all the other stuff), but boy, did I feel slighted on my vacation day yesterday when I checked the daily blogs and saw them list the EP-1 pre-order sites, and leave us out.
So here it is: we take preorders. Sorta. We’re not the sorts to twist your arm into commitment, instead what we do is run a waiting list. You get on it, we append you. We get product in, we go down the list. When we get to your name, we call you up and ask if you still want it. If you do, bam, we getcha taken care of. If you don’t, it’s cool, and there’s no paperwork shuffle to get your money back. It’s like pre-orders done better. We promise.
Want to get on a wait list for anything new and photographic, that number is always 1-800-726-5544 and we’ll take care of you.
Website ‘Splosions
Sorry to everyone who had problems with our website this afternoon (including you nice man from Missouri, I’m sorry if I sounded a bit rushed on the phone, I really do appreciate you taking the time to call). I cleaned something up on the backend of the code, which you can’t even see, but which couldn’t be implemented quickly or phased in. 97% of the site is exactly where it needs to be now. If you do find something that doesn’t look or work right, email me at [email protected] and I’ll get it fixed up tomorrow.
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