Written by Guest Blogger: Barbara Jolie

Let me preface this post with the fact that I absolutely love Do-It-Yourself (DIY) hobbies and projects. There is nothing like building or accomplishing something yourself, having it look great and exactly the way you want it, and paying less for it too. I love DIY activities as much as the next industrious, frugal individual, but when it comes to digital signage, there may be some things you just want left to the pros.

Finding Your Limitations

Depending on your needs (and your skills of course), digital signage can just about be a complete DIY project. But your digital sign setup probably won’t be without some limitations. For instance, you can go out and buy your own LCD screens, design a Powerpoint or some sort of slideshow, and transmit your display through some type of computer or vod player that’s close enough to connect through wire to your monitor.

But what if you don’t want to tether a computer only a few feet away from your display monitor? What if you want to leave your sign somewhere outside your business where people could easily walk by and take your computer or even your whole monitor system for that matter? What if you don’t want to constantly create new content for your sign or have the same content repeating for months?

The more you actually try to make use of your digital signage, the more you’ll probably realize that you will need the help of at least some professionals. Perhaps you can mount the equipment yourself, or maybe you can design and create the content, but there’s likely no chance that you can do all of that in addition to network troubleshooting and everything else, even if you do have a fairly large and bright staff with even slightly appropriate skills.

How Professionals Can Help

One of the largest benefits to hiring professionals for digital signage is that you have multiple avenues you can take. You can go to a one-stop shop that will take care of all ends of your digital signage needs, but you can also select specific services from specific professionals.

And once you’ve received adequate service from a professional for one aspect of digital signage, they can refer you to other professionals that can help you out in other areas of digital signage. Having access to a network like this is valuable enough on its own.

Of course you can try out certain areas of digital signage on your own. Perhaps you have a knack for design and content strategy and would like to handle that whole aspect of digital signage. Why not at least give it a shot right? Just remember that, after all your own work, if you end up needing a professional, you have wasted some of your own resources that could have been spent elsewhere. You run this risk when you take on any DIY project rather than consorting with professionals.

About the Guest Blogger:

This guest post is contributed by Barbara Jolie, who writes for online classes.

Category: Digital Signage Guest Posts

In Australia, we love our Bunnings and we noticed how they are using small digital signage screens in their warehouse. I guess the idea is to show product video and information to people interested in the product.

Category: Digital Signage Klips

This weekend we decided to look at the upcoming OS 6 version of the Blackberry and we were quite excited to see some of the amazing features. Also have a read of the comments of the video if you get a chance as its quite amusing. Also, I hope this version of the OS fixes some of the issues with the system memory – applications use system memory so I cannot install that many apps with only 256MB on the Storm.

So what do you think about the blackberry OS 6 video?

We’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

Due to the hype coming from the media in the last couple of weeks, we decided to further research about the Microsoft Surface. The unit was first announced in May 2007 and the first unit was sold in Australia this month. Apparently the unit costs $20,000 (ouch).

The  Microsoft Surface is a table-like display that is multi-touch. Basically responds to touch, natural hand gestures and placement of real-world objects which includes digital cameras, mobile phones and even business cards (I’m not sure how it would work with the business card).

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Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun