Show me the money…. Getting your programme brochure on your website

Why isn’t your programme brochure on your website?

That is the question I ask myself often when looking at events to go to, instead I have to scrawl through pages of your site looking for times and dates for a specific event. As a hardened culture vulture I’m willing to do this but what if I was just a casual browser looking for something to fill my time.

As a marketer or communications specialist you spend hours carefully crafting your copy aware of tone and style. The designer trained for years, spent thousands on software and spends days of creativity on your print.
Trees die, pulped flat, bleeched, pressed, dryed, shiped. Printed on, dryed again only to be distributed to the dark corners of other arts venues to be passed by, overlooked by thousands, none seeing that image you spent hours deciding on.

Take the example below from the Unity Theatre in Liverpool. It has been viewed 54,000 times. That is 54,000 times.

[issuu width=420 height=295 backgroundColor=%23222222 documentId=110627151325-b60fcf6092294ff4b9646de2e2d87e61 name=autumn2011_inkd_brochure_issuu username=unitytheatre tag=arts unit=px id=e99cbe4d-96b8-def4-4919-3493482ef046 v=2]

It is on the front page of their website but even so it is a staggering number of views and also helps animate their website, bring it to life.

How To use Issuu

Thanks to Tim Morgan for this great instructional video on How to use Issuu

PDF – what’s that then

It is good practice to ask your designer for a PDF

If your dealing with print publishing you really should know what a PDF is. A designer will normally send you many draft versions of your publication prior to it being signed off by you.

Now these can be huge files in excess of 20MB. They can often be presented to you in a ready to print format with wide margins and cut lines for the printer, if you ask your designers nicely they will be able to present to you a web ready version, with the pages resized (the borders trimmed) and in single page format. This is a bit of a bonus as it helps when you preview the document, it will also help when you upload to Issuu.

You don’t have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Distiller here alas it isn’t cheap however, PDF creator is free, very similar and excellent.

Remember even if you don’t use Issuu you should still actively link to a programme PDF or brochure from your site as it all gets indexed and ranked making your site a little easier to find.

If you have any questions or suggestions for articles then feel free to use the comments box below.