Well today’s lesson in creativity comes from working on my Café Press product page . . . long story short, I am using café press to publish my children’s fitness audio CD, Fitness Fairy Tales.
You can hear it on cdbaby . . .
http://cdbaby.com/cd/justinlocke2
This is all coming along . . . slowly . . . but I will say, the café press site is not making it very easy.
For starters, they have these "templates" for doing the various printed inserts on an audio CD. But instead of simply stating that the cover is part of a 4-page foldover, they present it in very odd ways. There is the cover, then the second page is called page 1 of 3 of a 3 page booklet, and the Tray "inside and outside tray" are the back of the jewel case where the CD is held in place, and "tray outside" is really page 6 or the back cover . . . And when you upload images it’s not in sensible order– you do the cover, then the tray, then the booklet, then pge 4, then 2 and 3 . . . what designer would have organized the artwork in this manner?
Even worse, the template I downloaded for the back tray had the option of putting the title turned 90 degrees on the spine, but they have since changed it, as apparently they can’t print the spine . . . so the design I did using their template from last week is now obsolete . . . no note about this anywhere, I had to call help to discover.
I have to say, this is taking an enormous amount of time. I have finally figured out the system of using their templates as a background in Photoshop . . . then deleting the template as the last step . . . but making up 6 pages, plus the disk artwork, the steps of getting everything uploaded have been quite slow. I’ve been at this since 9 am and it’s 12:30 now and I have only half the pages up . . . I am doing this blog as 2 images upload.What is more troublesome is once you upload an image it takes you to odd pages, hard to navigate back to where you want to go.
I like café press overall, but for someone selling a CD, the audio portion of the site needs a lot of usability work.
Okay, some fun news, I have been invited to be an occasional "guest host" on Lowell's NPR station, WUML. Will be maybe once a month. I will be sure to post when i will be on the air– 7-9 am–
See ya- Justin
