There are several options for integrating the Kaon 3D Catalog into a web site. For new sites, or sites that are being completely revamped, it is probably best to use the fully integrated 3D Catalog client for all product navigation. Your customer will benefit from consistent navigation and messaging, built-in search, and interactive product tours. You will get the power of a robust content management system that makes maintenance easy, and supports advanced features like managing international content. The rich client also acts as a portal to expanded information such as product brochures or specifications. You can easily tie the client into a "shopping cart" system as well, without forcing your customer to leave the consistent experience.
For mature web sites with their own content management system already in place, it probably doesn't make sense to use the 3D Catalog client for all your products. Having parallel ways to navigate your catalog will just confuse your customer, and keeping all the messaging synchronized can be a problem as well. For clients like you, we recommend that you place the 3D models onto your existing web pages in place of the 2D images you have today. The 3D models are often no larger than high-quality JPEG images, and because of the streaming capabilities of the Kaon platform, even large 3D models will show up right away. For that rare customer that does not have Java enabled, the still images you use today can appear instead.
Companies with large catalogs often create "micro-sites" with a subset of their products targeted at a particular niche. For example, a networking equipment supplier might create a micro-site for home wireless networking. In this case, you can create an individual 3D Catalog including a subset of the products on your site, and the messaging around those products can be tuned specifically for that application. The 3D Catalog content management system allows you to create as many catalogs as you like, including whatever products you have loaded into the system. You can re-use existing product tours for those products, or create catalog-specific product messaging. It's all under your control.
In place of the grid of thumbnail images, you can use a solution diagram. When your customer floats the mouse over a box in that diagram, additional information is shown. Clicking on a box in the diagram can open a 3D product page, or take the user to a list of products that are appropriate in that spot.
Yes, using the content management system, you can easily create many "catalogs" covering different parts of your product line, or using different marketing messages, and then deploy those on all the web sites you use.
Yes, the content management system outputs a plain HTML version of your catalog along with the content used by the rich client interface. Search engines will index this plain version, and visitors coming to those pages will be re-directed to the rich client interface automatically.
You do. While Kaon provides access to the content management system on hosted servers, the output of that management system should be deployed on your web site. (If you don't have a web site, we can help set you up with an affordable provider.) All the navigation and search logic lives in the client, so your 3D Catalog can be deployed on any ordinary web server, with no server-side technologies required. It even works from your local disk, so you can easily deploy your catalog through direct mail, on CDs or USB keys.
In addition to managing 3D Catalog content, the vSpace Server infrastructure can create still images, illustrations, videos, 3D PDFs, and 3D PowerPoint slides. For small additional fees per model, Kaon will enable these features, and train you on how to use the Still Image Composer and Video Clip Composer modules (they're really easy to use). You can create all the content you need, using Kaon's massive server capacity.