Bray reworks business plan as dispute continues. (Technology).

DIANE BRAY EAGERLY AWAITS her day in court as the dispute between her company, Sea Tropics Inc., and Einstein Systems Inc., both of Little Rock, works its way through the Pulaski County Circuit Court system.

At the center of the dispute is an unlaunched Web site for Sea Tropics.

Einstein Systems sued Sea Tropics on Aug. 1 to collect the $106,000 balance Einstein said Sea Tropics owed for the Web site it developed for Bray's furniture importing and sales business.

On Aug. 21, Sea Tropics filed a counterclaim asserting that, on the contrary, Einstein Systems owes it for an unspecified amount of damages as a result of not providing the Web site for which Bray already had paid in excess of $81,000.

A court date hasn't been set yet, but Bray said the case should go to trial in a couple of months.

In the meantime, waiting for the payment hasn't affected Einstein significantly, said Terron Lindholme, Einstein Systems' chief operating officer.

But the story isn't the same for Sea Tropics.

Bray said not having a Web site has been devastating to her company. Her business plan relied heavily on Internet sales.

The Web "was one of the major components of the business, and we spent a year preparing for it," Bray said. "Then right at the point that it was ready to go forward and open up is when everything kind of turned sour."

She said she's had to completely reverse the company's marketing strategy and go to the traditional mode of selling, which includes everything from direct mail to personal contact.

And that required Sea Tropics to redo all of its marketing pieces because they promoted the nonexistent Web site, she said.

"It's affected our pricing out of Asia, because part of the pricing we had was based on our marketing of products that had never been marketed in the U.S.," she said. "It's affected my agent over there. It's had a long-reaching effect on a lot of different people -- mostly me."

She declined to say how much Sea Tropics sales were for 2001; but they were lower than expectations, which her original operations plan projected at more than $10 million.

"There is no way to even tell you how detrimental financially this has been," Bray said. "We still don't have a Web site we even paid for."

Bray said she has taken out loans to support the company but wouldn't say how much. Public records show that on Oct. 24 she obtained a $1 million mortgage on her Little Rock home and that on Nov. 13 she used the house to secure an additional $450,000 loan. It could not be determined whether any other properties might have been connected with the loans.

In July 2000, Bray hired Einstein Systems to create a Web site so Sea Tropics could sell imported furniture over the Internet. Between September and December 2000, she paid Einstein Systems more than $81,000 for the development of the site.

Bray said she never saw a working Web site and stopped paying in January 2001. But Einstein said its Web designers kept working on the site, which ended up with a price tag of $187,476.25 -- which Einstein blamed on the additional features Bray kept ordering.

Einstein sued to force Bray to honor an arbitration clause in their contract, but last summer, Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza dismissed the complaint, ruling that there wasn't a valid contract to enforce.

Sea Tropics' attorney, Philip Kaplan, asked for attorney's fees of $7,445 and court costs of $52, but that request was denied.

Bray said she hasn't planned on getting another Web site.

"There was far too much put into the first one to try and reproduce [it]," Bray said. "We'll wait and see what happens at the trial and then go from there."