Using "The Machine"

Every business faces the challenge of describing their products or service offerings to potential customers.  There are many ways to do this and primarily for businesses that are online their web sites contain the product(s) they are selling or describes the services that can be offered.  All businesses these days no matter how small or the industry should have a web site with product and service information. 

However, in this series of two posts I want to help you explore some alternative ways to display that content on your web site that will set you apart from your competitors and at the same time provide a more vibrant presentation to your perspective customers.

So lets learn how to "Use the Machine" to first make a compelling flash style presentation for a service company.  In the follow-up post, I will cover creating an online video for the same company. Both of these examples are not meant to replace the content on your web site but instead supplement.

In the first example, let's create a online presentation describing and showcasing the services offered from a fictional landscaping company. Lets call our landscaping company "Paradise Landscaping". Most landscaping companies have a basic web site that describes their services, provides a portfolio of pictures and maybe some customer testimonials.

So we are going to create a presentation, in a tool called sliderocket.  I am not going to go into detail as to how to use the tool.  It is similar to many other presentation tools like Microsoft PowerPoint. The key thing to understand is what is possible with such a tool.  For example, animation and pictures.. also sound (music) although my example below has no sound but there is no reason why it couldn't.

There are several of these type of presentation tools on the Internet most of them allow for you to Import Microsoft PowerPoint files and they each have various degrees of flexibility when it comes to the animations, transitions and audio support.  So I would recommend trying them out the next time you have a compelling story to tell or need additional media like audio or animation to help sell your product.

Below is a list of similar services and a brief description.

sliderocket - currently in "preview" but I believe they are handing out accounts so try signing up, free for now.

ZOHOShow - another of the excellent ZOHO tools that are free.  Also has import capabilities.

Google Docs - Google Docs has a "presentation" document, this tool is a little more limited than the the other presentation tools but still is an excellent choice especially if your a Google fan, it is also free.

slideshare - site primarily used to upload existing PowerPoint presentations so you can share on a web site, also free.