Dakota Matrix - Past, Present & Future

Lately, some of our customers have asked us why we are re-designing our website and we've also been told not to because they like the old website - 'why fix what's not broken'. Well, there are a few reasons for the re-design, but most importantly it was 100% necessary to continue to offer our customers quality mineral specimen online at all! The DMM website we just laid to rest was designed in 2000-2001 with embedded tables in old school Html code, which in the tech world means that it may have well been designed in the late Cretaceous. New browser technology is becoming so advanced that many browsers no longer support the old code and slowly things began to fall apart, orders were dropped, items were double sold, things that had been long deleted suddenly came back online, etc. Additionally, the embedded tables design made it nearly impossible for search engines to 'see' the website content and as a result any new potential customers couldn't 'see' us either. We realize that after 12 years everyone is confortable with how things work, but we think the all the changes and new functionalities will be great and that our customers will have a better shopping experience as a result.

On a related side note, I'd like to mention some things about new browser technonogy and how best to view the new website. We are not biased, but the best browser to use currently is Firefox, followed by Internet Explorer 9 and Internet Explorer 8. Although, older browser versions or other browsers (i.e. Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 6, Opera, Safari etc.) should support the website, at least for a little while considering that browsers update versions every 6months or less, we suggest using Firefox or Internet Explorer versions 8 and version 9. If you experience problems viewing the website or shopping please email us dmmcart@gmail.com.

Now that we have explained somes of our reasons for the re-design we want to share some screen shots of DMM past....

We recently discovered the website Internet Archive: Wayback Machine and we have had a blast from the past looking at the Dakota Matrix Minerals website from the last 13 years, from 1999 until now. Here are some snapshots as our website grew from a baby website of embedded tables Tom created in Word to the fancy functional website beast it is today, enjoy!

Dakota Matrix Minerals - circa 1999-2000