Business Plan

Looking at magazine print prices, I found this website that gives you options to select to printing options and then generates a price based on factors such as colour or black and white print, page size and amount, paper quality and finish.

  
From the choices that I selected, to have 1000 copies printed would cost £1,527 which would mean the cost individually would be roughly £1.53, I think this would be quite expensive for an individual retail price. This cost is for 1000 copies with 48 pages including the cover and back, if this magazine was monthly and we needed this amount of money to cover just the printing costs we would need to have advertising income of at least £1,600 just to cover the cost of print, before considering the payment to designers and people processing the customer data for the add's. 


Studio rent
I started doing a general web search for studio rent in Bristol and came across this 'gumtree' website and found this office space below for just £165 per month £38 a week.

I continued searching and found this perfect looking office space with a list of extra facilities included for £150 per month

So far considering monthly costs for print and office space rent if I was to select the second property and print 1000 magazine a month the cost would currently come to £1677 

next considering who would need to be employed, as the magazine will initially be printed by a private company staff wont be required for printing but two people may be required to proof read the document and final layout and check the first print to make sure that it is correct.

There will have to be someone who sets up a data base for customers details and processing the adverts, also some way of keeping track of any accompanying images that might be used in the adverts. Most company's that offer advertising services usually have two main ways for the customer to contact them either via phone or email, depending on how busy the phone is it could require several people to take control of it. the person/ people who answers the phone would have to be able to speak clearly and record clearly the information that the customer provides. 

The trade-it is a large paper that specializes in advertising of all sorts of things that are listed under categories within the paper and online and they originally started as just a paper so you would have to phone in to submit your advert and pay over the phone, however now the web is more popular they have a website where you can upload the advert and images yourself and you can select to publish it either just online for free if you keep it basic or there are a lot of options you can select to enhance the advert which you have to pay for including 'top ad' for £3.99 meaning that your ad stays at the top of searches where it is found. 

You can pay £10.99 to have it featured on the home page of the website.

you can then also have it printed in the trade-it paper for £3 as just text or £5 with a photo, it says that it is 'proven to generate over 8x more response!' 

There paper is local and regional and is seen by over 200,000 people per week, so this shows the scale of the business and just how wide spread it is. 

This below shows the price details for a possible advert, I made up some information and choose the section it would be published under and these are the options that I have for publishing, added extras to enhance it or continuing with the simple web ad for free.

Their Print audience is 50,000 a week [source] and the papers currently retail at £1.20 that would mean an income of 60,000
I would be aiming to keep the company local to start with and may need to investigate how many papers would be needed to start up, how well they will sell.

Dreamweaver

Creating a basic four page website using images and text as links.

notes on creating the website:

site > new site > name it

Server technology > no

select file location [create a new folder that all the associated website files can be saved in including images etc]

Remote server > none 

creating pages for the website

file > new > basic html

Extra Notes:

The selection of fonts are default because you don't have control over the way that the page will be viewed by others, if you used a created font or downloaded font that isn't installed on the computer that it is being viewed on the appearance will be different, dependent on font spacing and size etc.

Saving the page:

it is always best to save the pages when you start giving them easy to locate file names with no spaces as it could cause problems later with linking etc.

insert image

they can be dragged and dropped in from the folder on the right

or inserted, insert > image 

When the files are open at the top on the tab you can see if it has been saved, if it hasn't been saved there will be an [*] at the end of the file name.

linking an image:

here I linked an image to a page and to do so you can either select the folder tool and then choose the page that you have saved or simply use the 'point to file' tool to select the file as shown below.

further notes:

Page color, Modify > page properties


Resizing images in photshop to use as thumbnails 
image > image size 
change width and height [maybe 75 pixels]

Adding images, tables and linking them.

Insert > table 

Tutor Time

Focusing on Business Plans again we discussed as a group the ideas that we had each for a potential business.


The plan that I had thought of so far was the idea of creating a magazine/ paper & or website where people could advertise there creative skills, such as art, sculpture, web design etc.
The way in which the business would make money would be through people paying to advertise, the prices would be based upon the ad size if it was printed. 
To make the magazine more accessible if it received enough ad's it could be sold for a low price or even available free to pick up. This might encourage more people to take a look at it and therefore it would become more popular hopefully meaning more people would like to advertise, gradually increasing the size of the magazine and amount of people wanting it.


We discussed things that we would have to take into consideration such as the target audience we were aiming at, if and who the competitors might be and the kinds of attention grabbing techniques that could be used to boost awareness of the company.


Another thing we discusses was the relevance of a business plan and why it's important, Banks will usually require a well thought out business plan if you are looking to take a loan out for a possible start up of a company, as they want to be reassured that they will get the money back, no one is going to give you money for just anything, it has to be sustainable and you have to be able to show them that it will be worth they're money to put into it. 
If you need investment you need to consider what will attract people to put there money into your business, what makes your plan better than the next persons, unique selling point.
Business plans also make you consider how well the idea you have is going to work and if it will actually be worth it.


The next step I need to take is to look into existing business plans and decide how I can start writing mine based around the initial idea that I have.