Your wheel is new and your pumps are strange

Citation

Ellis, B. (1999), "Your wheel is new and your pumps are strange", Circuit World, Vol. 25 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/cw.1999.21725caa.001

Your wheel is new and your pumps are strange

Your wheel is new and your pumps are strange

Keywords: Internet, Printed circuit boards, Pumps

Although the style will remain the same, I am changing the layout of this column, so that readers can better appreciate from a summary table at the bottom what a given site is like. Instead of two sets of stars, there are now seven sets of scores, out of ten. To compare it with the old system, five stars would be equivalent to ten points. I hope this new table will prove useful. If any reader wants more or fewer columns, please let me know. Of course, any such scoring relies on a subjective appreciation and I do not apologise if my criteria differ from anyone else's. The advantage of the new system is that if, for example, the download time is unimportant to someone who has direct fibre optic access to the Internet backbone, he can now discount that column (except insofar as the server may be slow).

The central theme, for this issue, is pumps, as you might guess from the title (quoted from Rudyard Kipling's, A Truthful Song). Not just bicycle pumps, pumps you wear on your feet or any old pumps, but pumps as used in the PCB fabrication industry for many purposes in the wet chemistry and waste water treatment departments. These pumps have to handle many reactive chemicals and the choice must be carefully made for each application (for volume and pressure, as well as compatibility). Some excellent advice can be found in the first site I review, below.

Before I start, I should like to mention that I have written an article for Soldering & Surface Mount Technology, Volume 11 No. 2, on what I consider makes up a good Web site, with many tips as to how owners may improve their own. While browsing through hundreds of such sites for the MCB journals, I have been, on the whole, quite disappointed at the flagrant disregard for the surfers' convenience. Of course, there have been some excellent sites, well thought out and well executed. There have also been some that have been abysmally bad. The average is much poorer than it should be. In a couple of cases, I have refused even to criticise them, because I would hate anyone wasting their time to glean nought from something totally incomprehensible. If you own a site or contemplate owning one, whether you design it or have a professional do so, you may care to read this article: it should appear at about the same time as you read this (assuming your name is not at the bottom of a 40-long distribution list: if so, take out a second subscription!).

Along a similar theme, it is surprising how many small, medium and even large enterprises still have no Website. There is little excuse for this: a professional will put you on the Internet for just a few hundred dollars with a small site which you can expand (or have your professional expand) as time and resources permit. It is, by far, the cheapest form of publicity there is. Because you might make a gizmo that sells to only a small, captive, market is no excuse. Your customers will appreciate being able to consult your Website for news, technical service and support. If you have a fax, then you need a Website. However, and this is an important point, do not think that you will double your sales overnight, just because you open a Website. If you do, it's a miracle. More usually, depending on your product, it might take six or 12 months before you start to see a small improvement in sales because you are online. If you do not have a site, you can bet your bottom dollar that this small improvement will be turned into a small downturn, as your more cyber-minded competitors laugh all the way to the bank. Today, many persons in industry, seeking something for which they do not have a regular supplier of a product or service, turn first to the Internet to find what they need. It is far easier to turn to a screen and type a few characters than to lug out of your bookshelf those horrendously thick and heavy directories which purport to offer the open-Sesame of finding an article or a service.

Serfilco Ltd, USA

This site is fairly unique in its construction, but this does not necessarily mean it's good or bad. At first glance, the home page is simple, but you do have to wait for it downloading. This is because it is too big, well over 100 kilobytes aggregate file size, half of which is a tiny little rotating globe, perhaps decorative but useless. Another large file is a view of the catalogue cover which has a grey scale imaging on a yellow background, yet the GIF file is saved in 16 bit true colour. It may have been better had it been saved on the server in a more suitable format. The background pattern was good and unobtrusive. Navigation from the Home Page is easy through a graphics menu. Most of the daughter pages use graphics fairly modestly, with the exception of the catalogue, which I'll talk about in a minute. There is no Site Map or Search facility, so it's manual navigation alone, but this is not too difficult as the site is simple. Some of the pages are still "under construction". One page that I liked very much was entitled "...select the right Pump", full of sound advice and quite useful for those who are not hydraulic wizards. What I really did not like was the catalogue. Click on the menu item to access it and what appears? A half-finished page with three hyperlinks. Naturally, I first explored the "Table of Contents" ... Oh horror! It was a scanned-in page presumably from the paper catalogue, giving the page number where each item can be found. At the bottom of the page was a space to fill in the page number you want. There is also a subject index which works in the same manner, without hyperlinks to the appropriate page. Just for the sake of completing this report, I typed in page 123 as an example. All the data were on a GIF file, 42,798 bytes long in 16 bit RGB true colour, according to my browser, the true colours being black and white, and consists of a scanned-in graphics page from the printed catalogue. In order to reduce the file size to a minimum, the site creator reduced the resolution and the page is barely legible where there is small type and distinctly smudgy in places. The whole catalogue must be greater than 13 megabytes long, if you please. If you wanted to print it out, it would be a full-time job for a month of online time! I suggest it may be a lot better to ask for a copy of the paper one, sent to you by post. Just to compound matters, at the bottom of the page, there is an icon "Down Load Adobe Acrobat Version" (sic!). Click on it and what happens? "The requested URL was not found"! The one saving grace ­ and a very important one, at that ­ is that all the information that a customer would need is there. I hope that a true HTML catalogue will replace this form as quickly as it can be done: Serfilco will save a lot of server space and their site visitors will be happier with the faster downloads and better legibility. There is an information request form which is fairly standard but I suspect it is manually routed to the nearest Serfilco office from the Head Office in Illinois. In any case, has this company thought that some browsers do not support forms? Otherwise, the only e-mail addresses I could find on the site were those of the UK and German Offices: I suggest that they give the e-mail addresses of every one of their offices (including Head Office!) for best customer relations. Oh! By the way, Serfilco do have a very wide range of pumps and filters for many applications within the PCB fabrication industry!

Walchem Corporation, USA

The Home Page on this site is almost exemplary by being clean, fast loading and typically FrontPage theme style (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 Home page of Walchem Corporation

It is happily without the space- and time-consuming add-ons, with the single possible exception of a hit counter, whose usefulness I have always doubted. The menu, as on all the pages, is a simple strip of greenish rectangles across the top (on other pages, it is duplicated across the bottom, as well). A table of contents (or site map, if you prefer the term) is provided, which makes navigation very easy, because the hierarchy is readily visible. Pressing the "Products" button leads you to a page which is less well-designed, totalling about 74 kilobytes, somewhat on the large side for fast downloading. This is mainly due to a rather fussy photograph of a selection of products, but also four buttons linking to the main product lines, which could be compressed to well under their current six kilobytes each without losing anything. Clicking on electronic metering pumps leads to a horrendously long downloading page, totalling some 125 kilobytes or so, because of seven photographs. Three of these show the same controller panel in different modes, but they contribute little to the value of the site. I suggest that thumbnail photographs with detailed full-size ones available by clicking on them may be a happier solution. Each of the dosing pump types has a good description and two sub-pages, leading to the technical specifications and the dimensions, respectively (in one case, the page in question was inaccessible). Both were extremely good and explicit and reasonably compact on file size. The product line is restricted to a complete range of pumps for metering or dosing chemicals, plus some instrumentation of good use to the PCB industry, including pH and copper concentration meters/controllers etc. It is easy to communicate with the company, because all the data are on the Home Page, as they should be. In addition, there is an enquiry form which really lacks a space to ask a question, although it could be squeezed in to "Other" under the question of the Nature of your Organisation.

Filter Pump Industries, USA

This site is not outstanding, except for its mediocrity. The Home Page consists of a logo at the top, a list of nearly 40 hyperlinks to other pages and the company coordinates (except for an e-mail address) at the bottom. There are two buttons inscribed"E-mail to Company" but this leads to a graphics form which would be useless if the browser was form or graphics incompatible or simply had the download graphics feature switched off. The background is a medium speckled slate colour which alone is 13 kilobytes long (usually backgrounds are a small fraction of this, even when they convey some message). However, it is reasonably fast to download. Overall, it does nothing to transmit the Company Image to the viewer. Clicking on "Pumps" takes you to a single page with one or two monochrome photographs of each type of pump and a two or three line general description. Certainly, there are no specifications or any other useful information which would allow a prospective purchaser to say "Ah! That is exactly what I need". Besides pumps, of a number of types, this company also offers filters, drum and tank mixers and precious metal recovery systems. My opinion echoes that of my old Latin teacher writing on my end-of-term report, some 55 years ago, "Could do better!".

British Pump Manufacturers' Association, UK

In my cyber-peregrinations, I came across this potentially very useful site, but it is a real pain in whichever portion of the anatomy you care to mention. The Home Page is about 115 kilobytes long on a slow server (it took 2 min 11 sec for me to download it, with a good connection into the Web). What do you get for your patience? Not very much, a massive logo and a button inviting you to enter the BPMA Web. In tiny little letters under this button, there is a second invitation to enter the Web in a frames and table-free version. With my tongue hanging out, I chose this version and was relieved to see a text-only version home page come up. However, it had only four menu items and, when I tried to access them, my browser was unable to, simply because they were linked to the C: hard disk of the guy who designed the site and not to that of the server: don't designers ever test their handiwork? So, it was back to the Home Page and that big button. After a good number of seconds, three frames came up. The first one, across the top was a mercifully small 6 kilobytes. The second one was even smaller at only 2 kilobytes and was a welcome to the site type. The third frame was hardly larger at 3 kilobytes and was a simple logo. You may well ask, why a "good" number of seconds? The answer is that, behind these three frames, there is the page itself which manages the frame sizes and so on and there is also a Javascript applet tied to the third frame to scroll the telephone number across the status bar at the bottom of the screen, which works ad nauseam, not to mention the slow server. The appearance of this trio is quite pleasing. Clicking any of the menu items produces the result only in (usually) the third frame, not a new screen. However, coming to the nitty-gritty, one of these items is "Pump Type Search" and this is genial. It gives a linked menu of 68 different types of pump, such as "Chemical" or "Peristaltic" (the latter giving a File Not Found response, by the way, as did well over half the titles). This took you immediately to a list of the company names of members who make such a type of pump. Click on any of them and you will obtain their full coordinates and a company profile, with a link to the company Web site in the few cases where such is known. This is great, if only it was complete. I look forward to seeing this in full working order. This is an excellent initiative worth copying by other trade organisations. A full list of members is also visible in the left-hand frame, on request. Another useful page gives details of a multitude of training courses and seminars in pumps and pumping technology. By searching diligently under the heading "Latest" you can find that a buyer's guide is available if you send the Association a cheque for £20 (no on-line ordering with a credit card).

Table I gives a subjective score, out of a maximum of ten, for each of the main factors that determine the "user-friendliness" of a site reviewed above. It should be read in conjunction with the review itself, because a particular score may be higher or lower for a number of different reasons related to the site itself.

Table I

	Home page	Other pages	Downloading
URL	design	design	time	Navigation	Communications	Information	Legibility
http://www.serfilco.com	5	7	4	6	6	9		3
http://www.walchem.com	9	6	5	8	9	9		10
http://www.thomasregister.com/
olc/filterpump/home.htm	2	2	7	8	6	1		10
http://www.bpma.org.uk	0	3	1	4	7	6		9

Brian EllisCypruse-mail: b_ellis@protonique.com