Online Brochure
All of us, at one time or another, have used or at least seen a brochure. Most businesses worth their name have some form of a brochure in existence that they hand out to advertise their products or services. But, in the paperless age we live in, it is not long before brochures too went the online way. Which brings us to what is increasingly becoming a standard in the advertising and promotional industry – an online brochure.
To understand what an online brochure is, let us first take a look at a conventional brochure. A conventional brochure is a company, product or service profile that is printed on paper. It is usually handed out to prospective users of the product or service, or simply used to spread information about the company. A conventional brochure is expensive, limited in reach and often not changeable once it has been printed. These inefficiencies in conventional brochures have led to the emergence of online brochures. As opposed to a conventional brochure, an online brochure is inexpensive, easy to modify and best of all easily distributable. A simple attachment with an e-mail can instantly spread the online brochure to thousands of prospects at the mere click of a button. When the online brochure is placed on the company website, it can easily be downloaded by thousands of visitors. The best part of all this is that an online brochure costs nothing to replicate. Even if there are errors in the designing stage, they can easily and affordably be changed or corrected.
But an online brochure is not just a digitized version of an offline brochure. In some cases, an online brochure functions as the substitute for a website of a company. The best example of this kind of an online brochure would be what is available at www.explorer1.com. This is a company that specializes in creating online brochures to serve in lieu of an expensive and difficult to maintain website. Targeted mainly at non website users (of whom, there are relatively few numbers!) these kinds of online brochures ensure that information about the company, product or even service are disseminated to a wide audience, even without having a website. But these kinds of online brochures are few and far between.
The regular online brochure starts its life much like a conventional brochure does – at the design table. Once the brochure content and design have been finalized, the conventional brochure goes off to a printer to be printed. But an online brochure is instantly printed and ready for distribution with available software packages, the best known of which is Adobe Acrobat. Acrobat enables one click publishing of an online brochure. No hassle of color separations, no torturous mistakes that cannot be corrected and no expensive printing and even more laborious distribution. One click and the presto! The online brochure is ready to serve all your marketing and communication needs.