Japan and Reality...
I know the discussion board is on the list of things to do but I am not involved in that so im not sure how far out it is. I think after the chat room is where everyone is satisfied the discussion board is next, but im not sure of that. I have no clue as to the java stuff you refer to, but you might let nathan know and he may have some information or feedback...
As to the debit card I did check the menu and you are right there is not an option listed. I am not sure about international payments but in the USA a debit card is interchangeble with credit cards as to payment processing, so if someone chooses to pay by credit card and uses their debit card it should work fine. This would not be the case however if it is an atm card that does not go through the visa mastercard system, so there could be cases where a debit card that was not tied to visa mastercard would not work.
I will get the field changed to say credit/debit cards.
Our processer tells me that any card tied to visa mastercard should work regardless of geographic location. We do not have at this point the ability to do ach transactions from non us banks.
I understand paypal and verisign are popular systems and that is the system we have been using prior to this one. We chose to change because we were getting constant errors and many many complaints about the system not processing transactions. We tried to work with them but we simply got no where.
They were also unable to provide reports that identified what various transactions were for so a large part of work was tied to phone calls and emails asking people what the money they donated was intended for. We managed that as best we could by only allowing certain donation amounts for various things simply so we could tell what someone wanted done with their donation.
They did have a program to meet our needs but it would have cost us a very significant amount of money to upgrade to their program that would do this.
When we were looking for new processors we looked for the features they could provide and the cost. The new processor includes in their basic charge, which is less than we were paying paypal/verisign, features that we simply could not afford to buy from paypal/verisign.
The processer we have chosen is one of the largest in the world and the biggest thing we have now is a single contact person we can call for help and trouble shooting. In the past we were very dependent on email and call backs that could take days....
While we have certainly had problems since taking this live the response we have gotten to problems has been quite amazing and almost always included instant fixes. I am sure as with anything like this we will experience more problems and I do need to know about them, so everyone keep telling me of problems such as this and I will do my best to address them.
As to the page, it is what I consider a work in progress. I would appreciate specific suggestions for improvement. The goal was to consolidate several pages in several different formats that was all over the site into one uniform page that was quick, simple and easy to use.
I really would appreciate what you see as non user friendly and old fashioned and how you would improve it.
I will also check with our processer about Maestro, but I do know my own debit card is through cirrus and it is the one we used to do all of our live testing and it has always went right through. It is a visa debit card however, so are there non visa mastercard debit card's internationally?
As to the apearance of the page we simply at this point created to look like the rest of the site. There has been a decision made to work on the overal look of the site and "modernize" it. At present all the work is on function and how it looks is a ways down the road.
Remember we are doing this mostly with volonteer labor by people that work on this after they are done with their job, their family, their stuff so to speak...
We will probably never have a site like we could have if we had thousands of dollars to hire it done.
We also have an amazangly large site with over 300 seperate files and hundreds and hundreds of pages, links, resources, etc...
The work involved with even the most simple change can be overwhelming when you have 30 minutes here and 20 minutes there between jobs, dinner and little league to get something done.
I don't mean to come across negative or defensive in any form or fashion, I just want everyone to understand our limitations. I really reallly realllly do want your feedback, opinions, advice and options, but give me back ideas that include things that take cost, time, and all that into consideration. And a really good help is to point me to an actual web site that has function that you like, then we can check that out and see how it is done and what we could or couldn't do to make it work for us....
Sorry to go on and on....I tend to overexplain...lol
thanks so much for taking the time to post and please keep it coming...we really do need your feedback, advice and opinions to continue to improve out site...
thanks,
brent
For example, arriving in a country and discovering that my wallet contains only useless plastic!