Tansy,
I think Alan does his on PDF which seems a good idea...
You are quite right – I do.
When it comes to brochures I think there are two approaches.
The first is the commercial one. They are produced in their thousands and sprinkled like confetti at a wedding. I don’t think this is a practical approach for the private individual. The costs of production and distribution are huge. The success rate is microscopic and the content is set in stone.
The second is the individual one. They are only produced on request. The costs are minimal and the content can be updated at any time.
When I embarked on producing a brochure I did not see it just as something I would print and send in the post. What I wanted was a much more flexible situation where I
could print and post but I could also burn to a CD or floppy-disk or send as an e-mail attachment. I looked at various alternatives (e.g. MS Publisher, MS Word) and decided that PDF was the right format for me. Why PDF? Because PDF is cross-platform, the files are reasonably compact and the Reader is a free download if the customer doesn’t already have it. I have found the easiest way is to prepare the brochure in MS Word (the later versions are quite powerful in their desk top publishing capabilities) and then convert to a PDF. I am extremely lucky in having Adobe Acrobat Professional 6 but programs like CutePDF do a pretty good job.
I have achieved what I set out to do. I have a brochure which I can update at any time. I can print it or burn it to CD or floppy or attach it to an e-mail. Although it is 10 pages long and contains many, many pictures the file is still under 1mb so can be attached to an e-mail without breaching the 1mb limit that some e-mail systems impose. All versions, except the printed one of course, can contain active links to any websites I care to include.
Is it worth the time and effort involved? I think so. People do ask me for a brochure but perhaps that’s because I say I have one. They appear to appreciate getting a printed product or being able to print their own. They can look at it at their leisure and show it to their friends. The brochure can contain much more information and pictures than do any of the Property Listing Sites.
At the end of the day it forms part of an overall marketing strategy in much the same way as does a personal website.
Debk,
Your idea sounds much more like the commercial rather than the private option. When it comes to producing brochures in large numbers there is no question that privately produced and printed brochures can be extortionately expensive and time consuming. The very best double sided photo-quality paper will cost you in the region of 50p per page, your printer will take for ever to produce the brochures and will
eat ink at an alarming rate. If you want a run of anything more than a couple of dozen go and discuss it with your local print shop.
Did any of that help anyone?
Alan
Luckily the local Staples kids are usually willing to drop a file into Photoshop and ooch things around. (even with "ooch" being a difficult word to translate into Portuguese)
