If you’re new to the whole idea of selling reprints online with a Fotobroker setup, here’s an explanation of some your options when setting up a new site. It’s a question we’ve been asked a lot lately, as many sites move away from the full-integration of look and feel that has characterized our customers” sites in years past.
I wrote this explanation for a collegiate customer, but it applies generally to the industry and is especially true for small – or chronically understaffed – newspapers.
Here’s a little bit more information about the basic types of Fotobroker sites that we see most often. The titles are a little misleading, as even our most basic install is visually tied to your existing site.
The trend in the last year or so has been towards simplicity, both for our collegiate and corporate customers, but there have been some exceptions. I’ll elaborate below.It’s also probably worth mentioning that tech support is free, so you could begin with a simple site and migrate to a more involved build later on, (or vice-versa) as your needs change.
Basic Templates/Basic Visual Ties:
PROS: This is what we do most often. It’s the quickest to setup and it is the easiest to change/update when your main site gets facelifted. Typically, we’ll take your main graphic and the display (css) styles from your links, as well as your text/font styles, so it still feels like a part of your overall web presence. This is the easiest build to maintain over time and is often appealing to customers who don’t have a web staff that can keep a watchful eye over a more complex build/integration.
End-customers seem to appreciate the simplicity as well, as it avoids the biggest complaint about full integrations: “too many links, easy to get confused.” It’s also possible to use this framework as a base for further addition (like adding ads, or house graphics that link to other services you offer, for example). Two out of the three biggest-selling clients we have use a basic installation (or a hybrid of it), as do most of our collegiate customers. It’s possible to tie a basic installation pretty closely to another site, but if it needs to be exact, see option 2.
CONS: There aren’t any cons to this, really, unless your preference is for an exact tie. The “Basic” refers only to look and feel – functionally, it’s the same as a more complex install.
Note the similarities between UC-Berkeley’s DailyCal reprint site – http://reprints.dailycal.org and their main site: http://www.dailycal.org – this is a pretty good example of a basic install
Strong/Exact Visual Ties/Fully Integrated
PROS: This was the trend until last year, when we started to see things swing the other way. Essentially, this involves us running our software inside your existing web site. This method results in a more exact match visually across your family of web sites. Here are two subtly different examples of this type of setup :
the Sarasota, FL Herald Tribune – compare their news site: http://www.heraldtribune.com/ and their reprint site: http://photos.heraldtribune.com/
the Gainsville, FL Sun news site: http://www.gainesville.com/ and their reprint site :http://reprints.gainesville.com/
CONS: As mentioned above, once you add the navigation elements (links and graphics) required for your reprint site, it can get pretty busy on the page. Especially if our links are styled to look exactly like yours (which we usually discourage). That said, it can be done well. It just requires a web contact on your end that can help us with the integration and a vigilant eye, long-term, because…
…over time, this will be hardest to manage, as it will need to evolve to keep up with the look of your main site, and since a redesign usually means rebuilding your reprint site as well, it can be more work. If you have a good web team already in place who will be responsible for your reprint site too, then this is less of a problem, but a reprint site whose “look” lags behind changes to your main site will discourage customer confidence. We won’t necessarily know about impending design changes on your main site – and we don’t make changes unless you ask for them – so you’ll need to keep us in the loop if you elect to go this route.
This is especially true if someone else’s CMS manages your content for you, as you (and we) won’t necessarily know if code changes are made to your site that cause a visual break between your sites.
Wildcard Sites/Original builds
PROS: It’s yours and yours alone. It can stand apart visually from your main site (though most examples of this share some attributes of their main site) – and this “apartness” means that it doesn’t need to be updated every time the main site gets visually tweaked. The most successful implementations of this on the collegiate level are probably Michigan State’s http://photos.statenews.com and U-Penn’s http://photos.dailypennsylvanian.com
MSU’s first site was a basic type, and they updated to this version as sales began to climb. The State News manages their own html – including the sidebar photographer features and the ads on top, which they frequently change. The DP’s site is more static, but still visually independent from their College Publisher news site.
There are several examples of original builds (for individual artists) at the bottom of our client list: http://www.contextcraft.com/clients.html#photog
CONS: Short-term, this requires the most work from you, up front, mostly in making design decisions – and long-term, it has the same flaws as a full implementation, in that everything looks dated eventually. The flip side is that it can be good training for a young staff, depending on their level of involvement.
I think those are the major factors you should try to keep in mind, based on my experience with the types of concerns we frequently see. Again, what you decide to do is entirely up to you – we’ll help you get to wherever you need to go.
