Note: To protect the privacy of our members, e-mail addresses have been removed from the archived messages. As a result, some links may be broken.
Re: What Yearbook Companies does your school use?
From: mary maloney johnson (maloneymk_at_TeacherArtExchange)
Hi,
I used Walters for 5 years. I love them. They're very easy to communicate with and we always managed to overcome problems. Our deadline, however, was in the first week of February, which was really tough. I left the school after that 5 years of Yearbooking, otherwise I would STILL be using Walters.
Kathy
Last year we used a company that we really liked--sort of. It offered online layout (with templates that you could override to fully customize the look and feel of the book) and a very decent price. What we DIDN'T like was that the company's server was down soooooo much--sometimes several days in a row and that made for some frantic scrambling. Because of the problems with the server, the company has gone out of business, though they MAY try again in a year or so.
Therefore, we went through a long, drawn out process to try to find a new company. We finally decided to go with Walter's Publishing (www.walterspublishing.com) because they were the ones who actually printed the book after it was put together through the now defunct company. Walter's offers no online layout but several options. They're really pushing their "EZBook" format (lots of templates) but we didn't like that. We finally opted to go with their "Total Digital" plan, which means we're doing all of the layout in Photoshop, using one template which just sets the outer margins. While a lot of the pages won't be too bad (I hope) I'm not looking forward to trying to line up all the student pics and names in photoshop. I'll be doing this with the help of just one student. It's going to be completely crazy and more than a little intense between now and our early March deadline.
To complicate matters completely, we'd arranged to have a different photographer do the student pics (someone OTHER than LifeTouch). I didn't arrange this--someone else did. So....a week before our school pics are to be taken, a call was placed to the photographer to confirm our time/date and guess what? The phone had been disconnected and the guy had seemingly dropped off the face of the planet!
In a mad scramble, LifeTouch was called to do the pictures, but of course they were booked. We finally got a date in November (I think it was) but enroute to the school on the day for school pictures, their main photographer hit a deer and totalled her car! (She was okay, thank goodness.) We finally had pics taken in DECEMBER and retakes were taken this Tuesday!! I doubt if I'll get a CD from the company for at least 2-3 weeks and so I've already started scanning senior pictures (from some type of proof that doesn't have their copyright info on them) and I'm just hoping against hope that I won't have to scan ALL of the classes (grades 6-12) and ALL of the faculty.
So--needless to say, this has not gone particularly well. On the plus side, the student who's working with me is learning a whole lot about photoshop and he's even teaching me stuff!
-- Sharon www.art-rageous.net www.cafepress.com/artrageous --- ---
  
|
