"Build Your Own Cable" Page at Redco.com

[chrisredco]

Since we've had a lot of great feedback from the folks here, I'm "secretly" announcing a new page that we are currently testing at www.redco.com

This page allows you to custom design your own single-channel or multi-channel cabling in realtime.

As you choose your cable type preference, the menus automatically populate with available cables and compatible connectors.

Change cable, connectors and length and the price will update in realtime.

When you are done, just enter the quantity of that specific cable you want, hit the "Buy" button, and add it to your shopping cart.

This is being tested "live" on our site for any bugs, but will function should you like to try it (and even buy something!).

Here's the link:
http://www.redco.com/shopdisplayprod...n+Custom+Cable

Give it try if you like and please let me know if you have any problems/suggestions.

Thanks for your time,
Chris Stubbs
Redco Audio

[dasbin]

Cool idea!
Rather pricey compared to just buying the bulk cable/components seperately and making your own, but I suppose a profit has to be made somewhere.

Suggestion: Have the "typical" configurations for each list at the top.
For example, the first thing on the list for XLR connectors is a right-angle connector. Most people don't use right-angles. Having good default choices could make it easier for some people.
Also, it would be REALLY cool to have a picture and/or short description of each item pop up next to it as soon as you select it from the combo box. That way you can keep tabs on what you're building and what it will look like.

[thearnicasync]

Yeah, gotta be honest. The place down the street sells the Mogami quad mic cables for exactly what you do. Same NCm/fX neutriks, yadda, yadda...

Great deals on bulk though...I'll be ordering soon!

kb

[dasbin]

I buy most of my bulk from Have Inc. Great service and the cheapest prices online I could find.
EG, the stuff I usually use (Canare L-4E5C) is 8 cents/foot cheaper there.

[chrisredco]

Thanks for the suggestions. All are appreciated. Keep them coming!

Thanks,
Chris

[chrisredco]

Your suggestion on the overall pricing made me see that the charge on the page was more than it should have been. The pricing has been reduced across the board.

Hopefully it should seem more competitive with other pre-made cables being offered.

Thanks,
Chris

[T-rex]

My only suggestion is this: once I have my connectors and set up, I should be able to click a different cable and have everything else stay the same, just the price will update. This way I could easily compare prices etc without having to re-enter the connectors, length etc.

[chrisredco]

Because many cables don't share compatible connectors (ie: Mogami W2552 can accept a TT plug, Mogami Quad cannot), the logic needs to reset when a new cable is chosen.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

Chris

[chrisredco]

For anyone still needing it, you have a couple days left to get a FREE Exhibits only pass to AES through Redco. Here is the page:

Free AES Pass

[Dangerous Dave]

Chris

Sent you a PM about some cabling I need thumbsup

Peace

DD

[audiothings]

unit of length...meters? feet?

self.

[deft_bonz]

Very nice idea.

I'd have another suggestion. To get a better overview within the pull down menus, it'd be nice to have the description of e.g. the connectors in one column. At the moment they're not in a row.

Let me show you what I mean. They look like this:

NC3FX Connector Description which is pretty long
NC3FX-BAG Connector Description which is pretty long
NC4FX-D Connector Description which is pretty long
NC4FX Connector Description which is pretty long
NC4FX-BAG-RF Connector Description which is pretty long


It'd be much easier to read if you change it to that:
NC3FX Connector Description which is pretty long
NC3FX-BAG Connector Description which is pretty long
NC4FX-D Connector Description which is pretty long
NC4FX Connector Description which is pretty long
NC4FX-BAG-RF Connector Description which is pretty long

[thearnicasync]

Originally Posted by chrisredco

Your suggestion on the overall pricing made me see that the charge on the page was more than it should have been. The pricing has been reduced across the board.

Hopefully it should seem more competitive with other pre-made cables being offered.

Thanks,
Chris

That pricing now seems SUPER competetive...

Rock on!

[chrisredco]

deft_bonz

I think I see what you mean, but the two examples in your post look identical to me. Could you clarify what you mean a little bit more. I'm not sure I can change the layout of the menus much, but I'll try if it makes it easier to read.

Thanks,
Chris

[chrisredco]

Forgot to mention, cable lengths are in FEET. I'll make sure to clarify this on the site.

Thanks for all the suggestions. Keep them coming.

Thanks,
Chris

[deft_bonz]

Originally Posted by chrisredco

deft_bonz

I think I see what you mean, but the two examples in your post look identical to me. Could you clarify what you mean a little bit more. I'm not sure I can change the layout of the menus much, but I'll try if it makes it easier to read.

Thanks,
Chris

LOL, sorry I hadn't reviewed my post

Let me explain it like this: It should look like 2 straight columns with relative space in between. Thus the beginning of the description column starts always at the same place, aligned (that was the word I was thinking of )


BTW: Chris and his team do a great job. I can recommend them to anyone.

[chrisredco]

Gotcha. That's what I thought but wanted to make sure. I agree that would make the menus easier to read. I'll see what I can do.

Thanks again,
Chris

[ajcamlet]

Chris - how about an option to leave the ends raw on one end?

[bmcginnis]

Originally Posted by chrisredco

Thanks for the suggestions. All are appreciated. Keep them coming!

Thanks,
Chris

This is a good idea, since it's kind of a hassel ordering the way it is now.
Since I just ordered a bunch of cable from you, this was a good test.


Some suggestions:
In general - I would like this more graphical and put unit prices all over it so it's not such a guessing game to figure out the costs of the cable.

Instead of drop-down list for connector ends, I would prefer seeing a radio box with a pic of each connector type beside it instead. You might as well display the price of each connector next to the connector graphic while your at it since that makes it more intuitive on the cost associated with each option.

You could have 2 of these connector radio selection boxes on the page (one for each end of the cable) It's far less confusing IMHO and it's more graphical in nature (i.e. users are less likely to make mistakes). For example, someone might be asking for female XLR, but they really meant a male XLR - that's easy to remedy by showing pics of the cable they ordered.

I would like to see displayed a simple graphic composite of the specified cable + connectors at the bottom of the page next to the "add to cart" just to be double-sure the user didn't screw up the cable spec.

You should put units of measure next to the length data entry box (e.g. inches)
It's unclear if a value of say '5' was to be inches, meters, or feet for instance.
It would be helpful if you had (again) a radio selector with prices for standard
lengths (e.g. 3', 5', 10', 15', 25', custom)

I for one would opt for longer cabling if I knew it costs just a little more for it. Most people are probably too lazy to type in different lengths to see what magically appears on the price for it. For example, one cable I made cost just
$3 more to make it 5 instead of 3 (I hope that was 5 feet and not inches), but I sure would never have guessed it would be that inexpensive. If not, at least maybe some text near there that says "This cable costs: $5/ft" or something similar.

Maybe there's some other cable options to add? like the TRS insert cables with separate tip/ring (send/return) connectors and mult'd output cable
connectors that I didn't see but I needed on one of my recent orders. You'd probably want pics of these
kinds of configurtions so people don't get confused.

I would definitely have an "shopping cart" button. My hope would be some additional discounting and at least free shipping when that cart gets lots of cables in it!


All this is trivial web programming (it looks like you're using Microsoft IIS / .Net)

[chrisredco]

Thanks for the list of suggestions. The graphic aspect is something I was thinking from the beginning as well, but it is beyond my meager programming at the moment I'm afraid. Hopefully in the near future we can make that happen.

I added a "feet" next to the cable length box, thanks for that suggestion.

I would like to allow more customization for folks, but the problem that happens is if you don't have some limitations, then the potential for un-realistic cables being built is very strong. We'll be adding some abilities for things like Insert cables and more than one connector on one side of a snake in the near future.

The menus populate with only the connectors that will work on the cable selected, which means if we had radio buttons with pics, somehow only certain radio buttons could be available or chosen depending on he cable choice. I suppose this could work, but I'm not sure how to make the radio buttons interactive with a cable choice menu (or cable choice radio buttons). Something to look into.

Thanks for all the great ideas. Hope to implement some of them sooner and later. I'd love to have this page something folks look forward to using and buying cables with.

Thanks,
Chris

P.S. bmcginnis, you mention the shopping cart button. id you mean the "Add to Cart" button or something else? There is an Add to Cart button under the price.

[GPl]

Great idea Chris. I actually went through it pretty quick. The only problem I had was when using the scroll on my mouse, it would also change the feilds I had selected to something else and I had to go back and re-select. Not using the scroll, I made up custom cable orders very quickly. Prices are looking good even for up here in Igloo Land.

Regards,
Michael Scott

[bmcginnis]

Originally Posted by chrisredco

...
The menus populate with only the connectors that will work on the cable selected, which means if we had radio buttons with pics, somehow only certain radio buttons could be available or chosen depending on he cable choice. I suppose this could work, but I'm not sure how to make the radio buttons interactive with a cable choice menu (or cable choice radio buttons). Something to look into.

...

P.S. bmcginnis, you mention the shopping cart button. id you mean the "Add to Cart" button or something else? There is an Add to Cart button under the price.

Most e-commerce sites take you to the "cart page" when you click
on the "add to cart" button. I was hoping you'd have more discounts there
for bigger orders.

Some web programming ideas... (I'm an engineer what can I say?)

If you went with a "wizard" style of interface (like the checkout process
screens in most e-commerce sites like amazon.com, etoys.com, etc) instead
of doing it all in a single page, the programming would be real easy. You could
break it into 3 steps: (i.e. 3 different asp pages)
Step 1 = select cable type and vendor
Step 2 = select connectors for both ends
Step 3 = choose cable length


That way you can easily generate the code for the radio buttons dynamically
from the choices from the previous page in the wizard.
In addition to this, it is less daunting for the user since your leading
them by the hand more (step by step) through the process of designing
their custom cabling.


You can put images next to radio selections easily with html tables. Here, A pix
worth a thousand words...

<b>Select Cable Connector One:</b>

<table border=0> <tr> <td><INPUT TYPE="RADIO" NAME="c1" VALUE="html" CHECKED>8 XLR Male Connectors</td>
<td><img src="http://www.redco.com/images/thumbs/nc3mx.jpg" height=47 width=75></td>
<td>$6.75</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><INPUT TYPE="RADIO" NAME="c1" VALUE="text">8 TRS Connectors</td>
<td><img src="http://www.redco.com/images/thumbs/np3c.jpg" height=44 width=75></td>
<td>$4.95</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><INPUT TYPE="RADIO" NAME="c1" VALUE="text">1 DSub Connector</td>
<td> <img src="http://www.redco.com/images/thumbs/1125h.jpg" height=50 width=70> </td>
<td>$9.75</td>
</tr>
</table>

[chrisredco]

Very helpful post. I'll look into this as we obviously want it to be as user friendly as possible.

Thanks a ton!
Chris

[Diablo]

Just found this thread and tried to build and buy a Multi-channel Cable. Every time I would change the "Step 2: Select Cable" the page would lose the connectors and I would have to re-input them. Makes it hard to compare cable prices.....

[chrisredco]

Yes, at the moment this is necessary because as you change cable, your connector choices may change as a result (ie: TT bantam connectors can't be used on all cables, only some, etc.)

We may be able to alter this in the future, but not for now.

Thanks,
Chris

[Jonathan Starr]

The cables and room snakes you've made for me have been working out perfectly.

This new setup will make it easy for me to order more.

Good work.

[chrisredco]

Thanks to some great suggestions from folks here at Gearslutz, we have just added pictures to the "Build Your Own Cable" page at Redco.com. Now when you make your choices in the menus for cable and connector combinations, a photo of your choice pops onto the page to show you what your choice looks like.

Hope this make using this page more user friendly for everyone. There might still be a couple broken links on certain choices, but these will be fixed in the next couple days.

See it in action here.

[djui5]

I just wanted to let all know that I ordered a 3' AES cable (Mogami cable with Neutrix ends) with this thing, and I can't be more happy with the results. Price was great, shipping was prompt. I received the cable in prefect condition.

This is one hell of a genius idea. I can't believe how easily this thing works. Pictures and price updates without refreshing your whole damm page. It's amazing!!

I'll be buying all my cables from here now. Thanks

[nukmusic]

Chris. Can the cable builder be set to where if you change one drop-down box, it won't reset the rest of them? thumbsup Right now if you select everything you need and then decide to change the cable brand or type, it clears all the other boxes. maybe even add a seperate reset button

[chrisredco]

At the moment, the reason it resets when choosing another cable is that certain connectors won't work with certain cables. As an Example; Mogami W2552 WILL work with Neutrik TT connectors, but Mogami W2549 WON'T work as it is too large. If someone changed from 2552 to 2549 and the connectors didn't reset, the page might allow someone to order an "impossible" cable and connector combination.

If I had more spare time, I might be able to write a LOT of code to eliminate all the instances this can happen, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. So for the time being, the page will have to still reset when cabling choices are changed. Sorry for this inconvenience.

As always, your suggestions are welcomed and appreciated!

Thanks,
Chris Stubbs
Redco Audio