Progressive Solutions is known for solving customer challenges.  One of the ways we do this is building custom web portals. Being two Graphic Communications grads that can’t differentiate HTML from CSS, we decided to start from the beginning when describing a web portal. First, let’s take a look at the last part—“portal,” an opening or gateway from one area to another. Second, “web,” basically the backbone behind anything we do these days.

Those definitions still seem pretty vague. To help wrap our heads around a web portal, we’ve added a familiar word we know and love, web-to-print portal.

When thinking of the web we think new-age, modern, fast. When pondering print, images of Gutenberg typesetting the bible by hand come to mind. Let’s open up a portal and bring these hyper-opposites together!

A web-to-print portal provides an Internet tool to accomplish a wide array of print needs (without having to disturb good ol’ Gutenberg). By accessing a portal via a secure login, users can order customized print collateral to suit their needs. Now these needs can range from user to user, or in this case, from Steve to Amy.

For Steve, the HR Manager at XYZ Electric Company, this means logging on to his back-end portal to place an order for business cards for a new employee. For Amy, owner of Pretty Papers Stationery Design, it means logging on to StationeryHQ to upload her newly-finished Save the Date artwork and have the order shipped to her client, the bride-to-be.

Though Amy and Steve both have the same need – print – their needs are quite different, and that’s the beauty behind a web-to-print portal. It can solve a variety of needs, and it all starts with a simple conversation. Maybe we converse over coffee and discuss more benefits?

Let us know your challenges and opportunities. If we can help (even through a referral), we will. We are happy to discuss web-to-print benefits such as:

1. Brand consistency
2. Centralized print resource
3. Specific user access and capabilities
4. Customized templates
5. Fast and reliable online ordering system
6. Static and dynamic printing options
7. Reduced production time
8. The weather, great rock bands, or good restaurants

And no blabbering salesperson to talk to when you need to place an order…unless you want to talk to us…our number is below…along with our email addresses…how do you like your coffee?

Email: Leah at leah@printhq.com or Chris at chernandez@printhq.com

Phone: 408.982.1790

You’ve probably heard the term web-to-print or online print portal. Maybe? PrintHQ has been using this technology to help clients automate since 2000. Automated web-to-print solutions continue to open up new and exciting product offerings. Almost anything can now be produced in a one-off fashion and brought to consumers at a reasonable cost. A prime example is our personalized gifts for kids offering called Frecklebox.com. From storybooks, to puzzles, to clipboards, all of the 19 product lines can be purchased personalized, in a quantity of one.

So what’s PPP and why the heck would you need it? The “punch-out” solution we’ve developed is specifically designed to help e-commerce providers offer real-time personalization preview, without ever having to disengage from the original website. The user clicks on a link to personalize a product and there’s no new login required. No user visibility from site A to site B. Furthermore, the user can play all they want with product creation and preview, and nothing ever happens between the two platforms unless someone checks out with a personalized product in their cart. Nifty! If the user makes a purchase, the platforms shake hands and pass order information and artwork to the pre-determined specified production source. This could be one supplier for all products or many suppliers; automated centralized order distribution, that’s nifty too.

You don’t understand? Welcome to the club. It only took our development team 300 times to get this through my thick skull. Now I pretend to understand which lands me in deep dodo frequently. Here’s our graphic explanation for the technology-challenged (that would be most of us) PS_TechnologySolutions.

In summary, this is useless information unless you want to offer real-time personalization on your e-commerce website, without having to invest in a new six-figure platform. To see if PPP can help you serve your customers with personalization, we would love to have a conversation.

Emal: scott@printhq.com or Phone: 408.200.2710

Scott Feldman

I really like this article from Print in the Mix, on the social media research done by Optify. The link below may help you determine which social media platform is best for you to focus on. In a nutshell, Facebook drives the most traffic, Linked-in drives the most page views, and Twitter (by a longshot) drives the most leads. Read more here.

What social media tools are you using to drive your business? And more importantly, what’s working well?

Keynote Speakers Mark King, CEO of Taylor Made and Gary Vaynerchuk, Social Media Rock Star, Wine Aficionado, and Future Owner of the New York Jets, delivered captivating and motivating talks that were charged with humor and self-deprecation. Though their deliveries were night and day, their unique messages rang through loud and clear.

My favorite session, “Selling to Gen Y and Across Generations,” presented by Jason Ryan Dorsey had me on the edge of my seat wondering where the last hour went. I just love learning from folks half my age. Fantastic!

On Saturday night our group did manage to leave the Gaylord ecosystem for a few hours. After three days of 72 degree pseudo-outside atrium, the chilly Nashville air felt refreshing. The five bars we managed to squeeze into all had stellar bands and three times the maximum occupancy. Can you say sardine? We managed to have a great time with old friends and “sparked” new relationships as well.

Thanks to all the volunteers, the crew from Smith-Bucklin, the amazing partner exhibitors, and most importantly all the member attendees. You all make it worth the trip across the country.

Scott Feldman

While I was there I received a call from a client in Atlanta. Only being three hours away, I suggested a personal visit on Monday and that would save me a trip back and forth from the west coast.

Here’s my top three takeaways from our 2 ½ hour meeting in Atlanta.

1. With regard to marketing, we have a communication problem.
2. With regard to selling, we have a communication problem.
3. With regard to communication, we have a communication problem.

Are you seeing any theme here?

I will be the first to tell you that we know automated print manufacturing. Furthermore, we are experts at automated personalized print manufacturing. “So what,” you say. But, but, but, but… shoot, I got nothing.

What a wake up call for me to find a customer who doesn’t know about several of our capabilities, and how to leverage them to help grow her business. We are so fortunate to have fantastic people, processes and equipment. I know it has kept us in business for many years. I can only imagine how great we will be once we figure out that all the great assets we have cannot produce their true potential without a solid sales and marketing effort every single day.

Note to self: get out from behind the desk more often.

Our development process began like most; we’d question workflow, output, production, and of course PERSONALIZATION. We would get quite frustrated in this process because the personalization solutions that include advanced editing for photos and artwork are usually not very advanced for rules based type manipulation. Those personalized storybooks on Frecklebox.com require rules based personalization; for example his/hers and he/she selections need to be populated throughout the story.

Out of this need, a great solution for us was born. We built a system that addresses the rules based type manipulation issue and have since dubbed it our “Personalizator”. This diagram shows how the platform works from a higher level perspective, PS_TechnologySolutions. We understand that many websites may need to use multiple personalization tools to serve their customers. I created a very ugly document that has made sense to people with a significant technology background. That can be found here, Personalizator_2.

To see if this platform could help you serve your customers wanting personalization, we would love to have a conversation by email or by phone. Please email me at mark@printhq.com or 408.200.2711.

Mark is ready for a SPARK. Are you?

Dscoop8: 2013 Annual Conference
Nashville, Tennessee
February 21-23, 2013

It Has to Be Fun!

When a user creates a business card in a B2B system they are doing work. Its okay if the interface is utilitarian. You have succeeded if you can get the business card orders placed by your users and the business cards fulfilled.

We have been involved in web-to-print for twelve years. Our first site was probably the most difficult one we ever built. It was a custom coded on-demand book portal for a great customer and consistently generated between $40,000 and $100,000 per month in revenue for over four years.

The future of web-to-print is much different from our perspective. While I would love to be able to build and run a company’s website it is just not realistic in the future. While the site above was one of our successes we have had more than our share of failures. Sites we didn’t scope right, to the “we will build it for free and generate so much business” we have probably made most possible mistakes. Successes are more fun. Many in our industry are aware of our success with Frecklebox.com which is built in-house, but we use some of the technologies listed in the companies below.

The future of web-to-print is integration. I have worked with many great web-to-print providers including Printable, PageDNA, Presswise, Pageflex, and Pixfizz. Three of these I am still using and am considering adding at least one more. Some might call me a web-to-print hussy. I love this stuff and while most of the programs have flaws all seem to be supported by companies that really want you to succeed.  All have tried to be good partners.

However the future is different. The future is about your ability to plug in your specialty within another company’s websites. We have developed Progressive Punch Out (PPO). It is designed as a personalization engine with an open API (REST) that can plug into existing e-commerce systems. This is important. Whether you are B2C, B2B, or B2B2C  you are probably fatigued at the idea of adding another system with another user database, another login folks have to remember, another check out process people have to go through, etc.

PPO is built from the ground up to be plugged into another website. We use it in our Frecklebox.com platform. Our current partners use it within their sites, which are totally different technologies. It isn’t cheap but it can serve thousands of simultaneous users and is sideways scalable. It is straightforward to integrate into an existing site. A recent integration, where the customer had one programmer assigned to it, went from start of development to production in less than 4 calendar weeks.

If you would like to know more please send me an email at mark@printhq.com. Even if you are competitor I am happy to discuss it (without giving away the secret sauce). If you want to offer web-to-print and haven’t thought about doing this you better start planning this for your future in the web-to-print world.

I started in web-to-print by selling an idea to our top customer. The site was a custom coded and designed web-to-print system for on-demand books. Remember those technical manuals for high tech companies? We produced quite a few of those from 1990 until 2004.

Before you invest in any web-to-print platform like: PageDNA, Presswise, Pageflex, Pixfizz, Red-Tie, or XM-Pie you should take four critical steps. By the way, I know there are many more great web-to-print software providers that I didn’t mention or don’t know about.

The four critical steps are:

1.   Sell it to a customer or a partner (yes, this comes first)

2.  Clearly define what you are trying to accomplish with your web-to-print system

3. Clearly realize that while most web-to-print companies try to be great partners they are all selling software. It is your responsibility to determine if their platform will actually do what you and your customers need. Remember all systems have flaws.

4. Charge a price that covers your cost plus a bit of profit (and not from the print)!

Just to give you an idea. I sold one customer a web-to-print system based on demo I did on two platforms I didn’t even own. I explained that with at purchase order of $xx,xxx I could build it on either platform. They chose, I charged, we built. Of course I have also built platforms at our expense because it will generate so much print. The embarrassing part is that I have actually done this more than once. Make people pay!

Once you can tell me that you have done these things I will be happy to share the next steps….

Have a successful year!