Top questions to ask a Web2Print vendor - 05/05/2009
Obviously, web-to-print solutions come in many flavors. Plenty of companies are offering some sort of web-to-print solution today. We can imagine you're getting confused by this "Web2Print vendor cloud" and would like to help you out by providing "top questions to ask a web2print vendor". What's more, web-to-print has become a hype, a buzzword - so it should not come as a surprise that some vendors use this trendy word unappropriately. Hence, the first question you need to ask the web2print vendor in front of you is: are you offering a genuine web2print solution?
The answer provided by the Web-to-Print vendor should include at least the following elements: prepress workflow and composition engine. Some vendors developed their own composition engine. Of course, one can imagine that this type of engine is not as powerful, stable and robust as the industry's standard Adobe InDesign server.
One crucial aspect is the flexibility of the Web2Print solution. If you select a web-to-print solution "out of the box", you might be satisfied in the beginning but soon encounter the limitations of this approach. In contrast a flexible web-to-print solution allows a more flexible set-up, can be integrated with more environments, etc.
If you want to make money out of your web-to-print solution, it's rather important that the software scores straight A's on the usability parameters. Usability means "to avoid frustrated users". To realize this, the web application has to have a clean and simple design and flow. The following questions are thus quite important for the end-user: how will he select his templates? Will he customize his documents by filling in fields or by means of a guiding wizard? Does the solution provide instant previews of the templates? Etc.
Nex to the end-user, you should also pay attention whether the back-office to manage the system is user-friendly or not. Does the back-office requires knowledge of scripting and/or XML or is it just easy to manage in a web based back-office? Finally, you should ask yourself whether you can easily modify the interface yourself. Does the web2print vendor provides e.g. an API?
Web2Print vendors come from two different sides. On the one hand, you have the internet agencies that develop Web-to-Print applications. On the other hand, you have companies acting for years as an IT partner for graphic companies. Nevertheless, both are trying to become a player in the "web-to-print market". Developers that have been a dedicated IT partner for the graphics industry should be of your preference - since they have more knowledge, know-how and extensive experience in graphic themes.
Usermanagement is quite important within a Web2Print application. Are you going to add the new users manually into your solution or import them on a regular basis from another database? Is this second option possible with the application of the web2print vendor in front of you?
Templates are often a crucial basis for w2p solutions. It's quite important to know what is their native format: InDesign, PDF, Quark or customized templates? You should pay attention to this point when selecting your solution. For the best you choose a solution that operates on templates that can easily be created by your current prepress employees. Preparing e.g. the Vit2Print templates can be done easily with the current knowledge of InDesign. If you have to train your employees to be able to create templates for your web-to-print system, you'll probably have to pay extra for this training. Furthermore, we believe it's quite important to know what can be made variable in templates: just text? Text and images? If yes, can users upload their own images?
This question deals with the question of what kind of information you want to extract from your web-to-print solution. In the first instance one could think of the following questions: Can users follow-up their order state? Their order history? Etc. On the other hand one could think of questions like: which information is needed for the production workflow? Can I easily extract it from the Web2Print system? Do I get a standardized PDF? Can I have an InDesign document or an XML document as output?
We surely hope you are less confused then before and shrinked down your list of potential web2print suppliers. If not, we hope to have raised questions before you start implementing a web-to-print system. After all, with the experience we have today, we can entrust you that every successful web2print project has been successful because of preparation. Preparation is the key to make up your own "top questions" to ask a web2print vendor - and consequently the key to the correct selection of your web-to-print vendor, resulting in a revenue-generating web2print application.
Do not hesitate, shoot us your questions.
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