CD Business Cards

Have you had to do those?

[madcat]

I have a client that wants basic HTML pages presented on CD business cards. Have you had to do this yet? Did you build your site like normal and just transfer the pages onto CD --> How did you produce the copies. Brand new to this so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Madcat.

[rcjordan]

I've done some "A drive" sites for real estate subdivisions we market. Besides all links and image calls being relative, as I recall, the only thing that gave me problem was the directory root files had to be spelled out in the path, i.e., somedirectory/index.html not just somedirectory/. Works great.

[rcjordan]

<added>
If you build a contact form on the CD you should include a hidden field or notation in the title that lets your client know that the contact resulted from the CD rather than the regular website.

[mivox]

Producing copies: Professional CD replication services can be very affordable if you're doing large quantities, and you'll get the CD titling & logo screen-printed on the disk itself, rather than having to use label stickers & CD-R disks (much more professional looking).

Search for "CD replication" and get some price quotes in the 500-1000 disk range for your client. (You can also find CD replication services by looking in the classified section at the back of any musicians' magazine... ;) )

[madcat]

Thanks for your suggestions, all very helpful.

This is like anything else on the Web don't you think...Charge what you think your worth + expenses depending on the technology used? I haven't had a chance to look at pricing for this stuff yet-- see if there was anything standard about it.

[mivox]

Charge the same as though you built an online site (IMO), plus CD replication costs, and if you have to handle the CD face/case artwork, charge your standard hourly deisgn rate for it.

If it becomes a hassle to coordinate the CD replication, etc., add an "Administrative Fee" to the final invoice as well...

Nothing standard for that sort of thing, I don't think. CD Biz cards are fairly new, but you can take some notes from regular CD cover/graphic design (if you can find rate info anywhere).

[DrCool]

If you do some searching you can find many companies that produce the CDs and handle the artwork if you don't want to do that. They can also do a lot of different CD shapes as well.

[madcat]

real estate subdivisions we market.

Way off subject I know. Do you know about how many Gigabytes of data transfer that real estate companys site goes through each month by chance?

[brotherhood of LAN]

Maybe a bit OT here too but

I know someone who has patented an idea

Basically, its a business card, but within the card, on the bottom side, is a mini-CD ROM. On this CD-ROM, naturally, you could store thousands of HTML documents.

And its a business card in itself!

Its quite a nifty idea, in fact, the guy has a patent for the idea.

I dont really know how this fits into the whole topic, but you can get quite creative offline as well as online!

[madcat]

all links and image calls are relative

include a hidden field or notation in the title that lets your client know that the contact resulted from the CD rather than the regular website.

Besides the fact that bandwidth isn't an issue, are there any other differences between creating an online Web site and a Web site for CD?

If I used an all CSS layout, would it be possible to use JavaScript to detect the browser and provide an uprgrade screen before the presentation? Any advice would be very cool.

Best--

[Robert Charlton]

>>Besides the fact that bandwidth isn't an issue, are there any other differences between creating an online Web site and a Web site for CD?<<

Search optimizing would be entirely different... ;)

I sometimes use absolute urls online... can't do that on disk... but otherwise I would think that any site that you can run on a hard drive will run on a CD. Flash works beautifully on a CD (if you don't force people to sit through animated splash pages).

It occurs that CGI would probably present problems... maybe even a simple form wouldn't work... but then why would you have a form on a CD?

[hmpphf]

The advantage websites have over CD's is that when you make a mistake you just change it.

These CD jobs can turn into nightmares when you find you've had a thousand junk CD's burned for you. Maybe the copying companies I've worked with have been bad, but they don't tend to accept responsibility for any mistakes, and your client is unlikely to pay for re-runs either.

You want to factor this risk into your pricing, and make sure your QA is really robust.

[jammy]

just to let you know there are applications out there that can offer dynamic sites on a cd - self-contained database allowing queries and search functions (ASP with VB as far as i can remember). I've not used it - a friend told me about it when he was evaluating similar products.

i never know whether it's appropriate to post a url or not, so if you want the details of this particular company that offers the software - stickymail me.

as for CD-cards i found an initial Flash-based startup program was a good start as it loads very fast, and then (depending on content/etc) using Director for other tasks/goals (it's nice for detecting a web-connection). A flash-based initial autorun is also a nice way to make the cd-based web site run.

[backus]

I think you'll find these are CDs cut to business card size. Weird concept. Got a couple here.

[markd]

Backus, I seem to remember that CD which were actually 'cut' to business card size were a bit unreliable. Some were prone to causing damage to CD drives as they did not fit securely into the drives, particularly if the CD's were used on a variety of PC's and Macs.

I think I am right in saying that now there are business card CD's which are a product in their own right, rather than just cut down versions of full size CD's.

These new CD's are very reliable, so far they have been successfully used in a whole variety of CD drives.

[MaliciousDan]

brotherhood_of_LAN: I think what you just described is a fairly common practice already.

You can run CGI programs from those cd's, basically it's a regular cd with less space (about 60mb instead of 600), you could run anything you want off them. It'd take a little programming work to setup but I'm pretty sure you could distribute a copy of apache and perl on the cd, setup an autorun.inf file to start up apache with settings that point to the cd and launch a web browser to the local host (there is a lot of work involved in making that alone work but once finished it'd be easily repeatable... and there is the problem of running programs on different operating systems). I guess the point is the sky is the limit and jumping into anything fancy with those little cd's might take a LOT of foreplanning.

[ergophobe]

A bit OT, but a word of warning and funny story. My cousin, a stuntwoman, made up some of these a few years ago with promotional stuff. She sent them out at Christmas, not realizing that the impact force of the stamp cancelling machines at the post office is pretty high. Her clients (or whatever they are) all got a nice envelopes of broken shiny plastic.

Tom