The Developments Newsletter: April 14th, 2006

April 14th, 2006

Advertise on Facebook
by Dana Hill

Ask any college student you know, Facebook is an essential part of his or her campus life. Each day, college students login to Facebook almost as often as they check their email. Facebook is the #1 online destination for college students.

To promote your local campus photography business, Facebook offers online flyers. You can target your campus and for $5 your flyer is displayed 2,500 times.

This could be an effective way to:
•Promote a Reorder Week
•Promote a special offer or other promotion
•Run an ad for photographers

Facebook online flyers can contain links to your site, as well. For more details about Facebook's online flyer, view their FAQ page.

CCS Accounting Department Finds New Home
The staff in the CCS Accounting Department has relocated recently within the main CCS building at 1300 Metropolitan. The former production area downstairs at CCS was built out to accommodate Accounting, and the rest of the staff at 1300 are happy to have our Accounting friends closer. Click images to enlarge.

Grad Plaques
The grad plaque has undergone a slight make-over, in terms of text design. An improvement has been made to give the text an engraved effect, creating more dimension to the text plate and the personalized information contained on it.

Before

After (Engraved Text Effect)

QP+ Collage Improvements

Click to enlarge.

If you are offering collages in QP+, your customers will notice several improvements that have been made recently to improve their online experience and product satisfaction.

• A thumbnail size rendering of their custom collage now appears in
their cart.

• Customers now have the ability to enlarge their custom collage in their cart.

Click to enlarge

This enlarged image helps them confirm the product looks like what they intended to create.

Horizontal Images Increase Product Flexibility

If you are a Sports customer offering your events online (vs pre-pay) and have encountered the problem of your customers choosing horizontal images to put in sports products, you would be pleased to hear of some recent changes.

For a wide range of sports products (including magnets, trader cards, luggage tags, keychains, magazine covers) additional layouts for these products have been created to accept horizontal images.

No longer will your customer receive a trader card with a vertically cropped horizontal image in the image node. This offers more flexibility for shooting, as well as accommodating those sports, like girls volleyball and softball, where individual posing often requires a horizontal orientation.

Thank you to Leslie Broadland, NorCal Candids, for the suggestion. As more Sports customers employ the Speculation method of shooting the events and putting them online, this product flexibility becomes increasingly important.

Click to enlarge.

Tina Muller, wife of CCS Customer Radley Muller, was recognized at the recent WPPI Show. Her entry, “Coming Attractions”, was awarded first place in the Romance category of Best In Weddings.

Tina also had 4 prints hang and 1 of her albums "hung" with scores over 80.

Congratulations, Tina! Your friends at CCS applaud you.

Grad Images - FTP or CD?
by Steve Foisy

Should you FTP your grad images or send them to CCS on a CD?

FTP upload speeds will typically be 1-2 MB’s per minute. This speed will vary depending on your service provider. It may be faster to overnight your images to CCS on a CD and have us upload them directly to our servers than it would to FTP them. There is a $3.09 charge per CD uploaded by CCS.

All Images should be rotated to a heads up position to expedite the uploading of your CD’s as well as printing. CD’s with requests for heads up rotation will take longer since they cannot be directly uploaded to our servers from the CD itself. CCS will charge $0.10 per megabyte for all images in an order number if heads up rotation is requested. ($5.00 minimum per CD)

Use the CCS FTP software to properly organize your images in order number and roll number folders and renumber the images prior to burning the CD. There is a $16.00 per hour charge with a $4.00 minimum per CD to reformat your CD’s to the proper folder format.

Required file/folder format for CD’s

Order Number Folder
  Roll Number Folder
     Frame Numbers
  Roll Number Folder
     Frame Numbers
  Roll Number Folder
     Frame Numbers

12345678
  00001
     0001.JPG
     0002.JPG
     0003.JPG
  00002
     0001.JPG
     0002.JPG
     0003.JPG
  00003
     0001.JPG
     0002.JPG
     0003.JPG

Only use numbers in the order number and roll number files.
Roll numbers must be 5 numbers long.
Frames can be up to 8 letters or numbers and cannot include special characters, spaces, hyphens, etc. Underscores are acceptable.

Another option is to use a combination of FTP and CD shipping methods. In this scenario you could FTP your most important grads to achieve fast posting and send the remainder via CD.

Pack your CD’s well and backup the images onto a computer. If the CD is your only copy of images and it is improperly burned or damaged during shipping, these images will be lost.

Shipping CD’s & Film
Submit your CD’s and film to CCS with our newest CD/Film envelope. If you have older style envelopes, you can print this PDF file on letter or legal size paper and attach it to your current envelopes. If you have already filled out your envelopes, then just cut off the portion of the new envelope related to the services you are requesting (most likely uploading and scanning) and attach it towards the bottom of your envelope. Labels can be applied to your envelopes if they properly communicate the services requested. Use of the new film envelope will ensure that images are scanned and uploaded correctly. Contact your Customer Support Rep for questions and tips on how to fill out your film envelopes.

If you are shipping any film overnight, be very careful which services you utilize. Airborne, Fed Ex and UPS are safe shippers, but shipping with an airline will put your film at risk. Most of the major airports use the CTX high intensity scanners to scan all checked bags. Boxes shipped with many airlines may also be scanned. ANY film scanned by a high intensity baggage scanner will be ruined! We recommend that you with the three couriers mention previously.

If you are flying with grad film, always carry it with you on the plane and never put it in your checked bags. The carryon bag X-Ray machines are safe up to 5 passes with 400 speed film. Play it safe though and ask for a hand inspection. You can speed this process up by having your film in trays or opened envelopes. Be prepared though to have each roll individually dusted for explosives. Some airports are more thorough than others, and this process can take an additional 30-60 minutes at the security check point.