Staging area for PayPal-enabled website

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

Hi folks,

In the spirit of increasing our membership (or at least making it easier
for people to renew), I'm finally getting around to beefing up the website
to allow online payments via PayPal.  If you would like to test the
usability of this feature, please go to
http://stage1.aquatic-gardeners.org

and poke around.  Feel free to add things to your "shopping cart", even
maybe view the cart and proceed to check out.  Just make sure not to
supply a credit card to the PayPal folks unless you want to pay that
much to the AGA.  We'll do some "last step" testing later with real 
members when ready for this.

What I'm looking for is general feedback on the usability of the site to 
purchase memberships, books, etc.  Let me know your experience, so I can 
fix things before we go live.  (Like, does everyone get that annoying 
"This page contains unsecure items" warning every time they add to the 
cart?  Is it horribly confusing to figure out how to pay for back issue 
shipping to Canada?)

We'll be able to use this for contest fees, convention registration...you
name it!  When someone buys something, e-mails will be simultaneously sent
to David, Cheryl, Diana and myself, so each of us can fulfil our 
appropriate parts of the "order".  PayPal eats 2.9 percent, plus 30 cents 
per transaction (hence the "shopping cart", rather than "buy this
one item now" approach).

Between getting the membership database changed over last week, and
essentially putting this together in only 3 hours, I'm pretty jazzed
(enough to stay up until 2 AM to finish it)!

And now I'm going to bed.

  - Erik

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com