Gibber-gabber
When worlds collide…A McWebGuy speaks out about Dali Racing
beingzoe 2008-05-31 00:50:23 UTC

In my other life doing design work for other companies I have had the opportunity to work on many fun projects. One that still brings me great joy to this day is one for Mark Johnson of Dali Racing . Dali Racing is a leading manufacturer of aftermarket race parts for the Acura NSX.

While some big name companies certain make specialty parts for the NSX there are only a handful who are (nearly) completely focused on the NSX. Two of the big boys are Science of Speed and Dali Racing.

In fact, among NSX owners, like many niche clubs and groups of people tend to, there are a lot of factions within the NSX circle(s) over all manner of topics, many of which have nothing to do with the car. These divisions of interest and belief include such topics as Microsoft , how you dress , and where, why, and how much to pay for Oakley sunglasses .

But in the minds of the DaliMcWebGuys, whose understanding and vision of the NSX community comes from skewed interpretations of the stories of our beloved slave driver Mark Johnson, there is no rivalry or contention in the NSX community bigger than that of whose service sucks more, Science of Speed or Dali Racing!

While it is hard to tell, I must admit that upon doing some “quick” research (i.e. random searches for words like sucks, bad service, good service) searching the NSX Prime forums it is impossible to say who might suck more. Unfortunately this article is not a scientific inquiry so no answer to the question will be put to rest here. Though it was clear that Mark has pissed more people off, and this article is about that and why I would have it no other way.

Having worked with Mark for nearly 10 years, I can personally say he is a crazy man, knows that he thinks he knows, knows what he believes to be true, and makes no bones about speaking his mind. While at times I have winced as he describes his customer relations, the fact is I have no doubt he treats everyone, including himself, by the same code. He doesn’t offer club discounts because he sells his stuff at the lowest possible price in the first place to everybody. He does his best to run his one man show and will not apologize for how he conducts business unless he has patently screwed up. He is both a hard and fun loving man who is constantly on the go and extremely passionate about anything he endeavors.

And it is his unique style and attitude that makes him so endearing, and would tend to piss people off who are utterly lacking a sense of humor. That and he nearly always pays us for our work :)

But it is Mark’s extreme and sometimes kitschy sense of humor that is his most endearing quality. As web designers and developers though this has translated into ongoing battles over best practices, interface design, and design in general. Where some people might be more concerned about how to navigate their website, Mark has always been more interested in what you might find along the way. Thus his site is a myriad maze of jokes, public and private, to amuse the masses while they get a fair deal on the largest collection of aftermarket parts for the NSX.

While all this may be anathema to some business owners, Mark didn’t start Dali Racing to get rich. Dali Racing (whose name is it’s own joke taken from Dolly the sheep who was in the news at the time as the first cloned adult mammal ) began after Mark got into the NSX community and found himself disgusted by the outrageous overpricing that he saw in the NSX aftermarket parts market. This alone did not translate to creating some kind of egalitarian solution. On the contrary, Mark figured that he could make parts for himself at an affordable price so long as he made and sold X number of the part to the community. Through the years while this may appear to have blossomed into a huge business, this biased insider would say nothing has changed except that Mark really enjoyed designing parts and having a website. And it worked.

So to those individuals who would turn to Dali Racing expecting any of the traditional free market trappings of the customer-is-always-right were in for a big shock. This do-it-my-way attitude has nothing to do with a lack of concern for whether people are being treated fairly or getting the best possible service. It is about Mark and friends having a good time. Not to describe it as a private club, but quite frankly, if you don’t get the joke and you aren’t having any fun, fuck it. Dali Racing isn’t going to stop having fun because of you.

And the McWebGuys have never been an exception in this way of doing business. While always given a libertine dose of free reign on how to accomplish his goals of having the biggest, funniest, most informative NSX network of sites on the internet, we have been very clear directives on what the end goal was intended to be.

For example, given the directive to build an online catalog of parts, we design a fully functional database driven system, and then Mark says, now put the Gay Dancing spiderman flashing full screen every tenth time someone views this ONE part. We create categories based on standard and universal categorization of automotive parts, and Mark says, make categories called Boy Racer and Go Faster (which embody 90% of all parts he sells). Funny as hell sometimes, but if you are looking for a traditional shopping experience don’t come to Dali.

Browsing the Dali Racing catalog is quite the adventure. While browsing a list of superchargers, brake its, or shiny bits to satisfy your chromatosis you might find such things as Leather spanking belts , Buggy Balls , Corpses , Custom Hand Painted NSX Rock and the The whole company

One of our favorite stunts in the past few years was the “Easter Egg” hunt. On the welcome page of Dali’s main site, we announced that there was an easter egg hunt. Find the easter egg on a site with well over a 1000 pages of content. Right. Except that the industrious might actually do a search for easter egg in the Dali Search engine (famous for it’s please wait message, Hal is looking shit up…). To this searcher they would be returned a list of results ranging in length from 10 to 30 pages that were all titled “Easter Egg.” Now we could have stopped there but it wasn’t quite enough. So when you find the right “Easter Egg” page you were merely given a hint as to the location on the site of the infamous easter egg. That hint being, “What is the least read page on Dali Racing?” But if you did manage to find the carton of colored eggs partially filled with shiny shift knobs, then you would have been treated to $25 off shipping on any order placed on Easter Sunday.

In order to pull this stunt off we had to modify the search engine to usurp the results if the term easter egg was searched for and all the programmatic necessities to make it happen. Mark is not a rich guy and Dali Racing is not a wealthy multi-national corporation. Maybe we meet and work on the site four hours a week if lucky, and while getting new parts listed and useful tips and articles posted is the highest priority, humor and visitor interaction come a close second (sometimes first). It becomes plainly obvious that having a good time is more important than whether sales can be increased by 20% next year.

Even I will admit that some of these fun and games, and the limited time and money that can go into expanding the online Dali empire comes at the cost of usability and even to my chagrin, style and design. But there just isn’t enough money or time to both make Gay Spiderman defy the entire flow of the website and design the most cutting edge user interace and system schema. Every attempt to redesign and introduce a “typical” visitor experience ends up in yawns of disinterest or is utterly thwarted halfway through implemenation by the next hilarious stunt.

This has always posed a conflict for me. In my personal life I have always been a contrary thinker, more inclined to performance art and satire. But in my professional life I had taken on a very status quo attitude of meeting the professional needs of my clients. And I would have never sat down to consult with a client said, you know, making the entire screen flash with gay spiderman will really increase sales. That would have been assanine.

And yet, I sit here with the biggest grin on my face thinking about gay spiderman. Over the years I have come to admire Mark Johnson in ways that no other client has come close. But not just as a client, but as a human being. I don’t always agree with him, sometimes he pisses me off too. But that is part of what it means to be human. Mark is a true patriot representing the best and worst of the free market system. If you don’t like it take your money elsewhere. If you do, welcome aboard, the ride will be bumpy and you’re going to like it.

But one of our crowning achievements that inspired me to write this article was the battle between Science of Speed and Dali Racing. When the folks who don’t get Dali Racing start complaining about the usability of his site, they often refer in comparison, to the more common and sleek style of interface and no-nonsense information presentation found at Science of Speed. When confronted with this comparison you are likely to get the yawn from Mark Johnson.

Through the years, the McWebguys have attempted to infuse a certain amount of sensibility to the madness that is Dali Racing. Instead of replacing standardized category schemes with “aribitrary fun names”, we added the ability to sort the catalog by both. We added an in-depth highly functional search engine . We provided a master list view of all parts . We created an icon/image browse view , a text-only list view , and even created the ANYBROWSER 1.0 no-frills option in an effort to balance the humor with the usability.

But after hearing the Science of Speed and Dali Racing ease of use comparison one too many times, we happened on the best idea yet.

Say what you want about the Dali Racing website, it’s usability, design, or technology being used, but some of the Dali Racing site is still running code and programming from 1999 back when the McWebGuys were still figuring out the heck they were doing with this new eCommerce (and sometimes it shows :). While Mark has never permitted a complete overhaul to the look of the Dali Racing site design, the database driven functionality has meant we could have done it at any time (excepting the hundreds and hundreds of static web pages that were created prior). But faced with the Science of Speed comparison and how much people seemed to love that site, we decided to make our own.

Meet the Physics of Dali .

We recreated the entire Science of Speed site…Dali style! This we still believe today is the greatest homage in the entire NSX community. Every page, every screen, every feature matched one for one, but with more content and more parts!

Nefarious? Sure. Hilarious? You bet. And yet this is the greatest honor we could bestow. We admitted that if you wanted a straight ahead interface for finding your part without the danger of laughing or wasting a few minutes, Science of Speed had the superior site design.

It was all in good fun, and to the credit of Science of Speed, they have never said anything about the site. While I personally was sad they didn’t either yell or give us a quiet nod of acknowledgment, I will confess that I respect their behaving as gentlemen about the whole thing. As far as I can tell they are good folks with a fine service and the same level of perceived superiority and incompetence as Dali Racing from the same supporters and detractors, akin to the ongoing MAC VS PC maniacs.

For the record I have never heard Mark Johnson utter a disparaging comment about Science of Speed. Even the site parody itself was directed at the complainers in the forums, not Science of Speed. In fact Mark rarely complains about much, except when his McWebGuys break his site, or his machinists deliver unusable parts.

It is my opinion of suffering Dali Racing for so many years that I only wish I had the balls and self confidence to run a business as honest and true to myself as Mark has with his.