It’s that time of year again! Holiday card time! This week at Your Mama Reviews, we’re going to review four different online holiday card printers. It’s the Super Fantastic Awesomely Extraordinary Holiday Card Extravaganza!
Now, I should let you all know that I love making our holiday cards. I love picking out the right photo, choosing a cool design, cropping/trimming and getting it all just right. I love the final product. I’ve used almost all of the big-name card makers over the years so have a good deal of experience with the process and product.
First up: 365-cards.com Conan the Destroyer ipod . This site offers any sort of personalized cards – not just holiday cards. Invitations, greeting cards, announcements. The works.
Design
The card selection at 365-cards.com is huge. I mean HUGE. I only looked through the holiday photo cards – and there were 8 screens of 20 cards per screen. That’s 160 cards to choose from!
I really think they could use better search and sort functionality when browsing – especially with so many designs. There is no sorting beyond ‘Holiday Photo Cards’ – narrowing by number of photos (I love multi-photo cards), colors, holiday-specific (Christmas, Hanukkah, etc.), whatever.
Their designs tend to lean on the modern side of traditional – if that makes any sense. Some modern design elements with more traditional font styles and typography. Coming from a design background, I wasn’t overly impressed, but the designs were nice and clean and fun.
The paper they use for their flat cards is a 100lb white matte cardstock with digital printing. Pretty standard and what you’d expect for the price. The cards I received weren’t too flimsy but also weren’t the luxurious paper stock of other more expensive cardmakers. It’s not important to most people.
Step 1: Upload Your Photo
After you select your design, you’re able to upload your photo. There’s a note to people regarding incompatibility with IE6 and 8 – which, as a web developer, I completely understand that pain-in-the-ass nature of IE. However, just like any other web developer, they have got to spend some time testing and debugging those two platforms. IE6, unfortunately, still has around 10.6% of web traffic, and IE8 is growing at 12.8%. That’s almost a quarter of their visitors who may receive errors or other technical difficulties.
The photo uploader itself was easy enough to use – but had a lot of ‘directions’ for the user rather than building the capabilities into the system. I’m able to resize and export my photos appropriately; but the average Jane might have some trouble (and no doubt they get a fair amount of questions on this topic). The ‘directions’ show the size, filetype and recommended image dimensions of the image. Many of those things can be built into the system with an easy image editor (call me if you need some help, 365-cards.com!).
Step 2: Image Editor
Here’s where this site shines: the image editor was very easy to use. Simple drag-and-drop image interface where you can resize your uploaded image, crop it within the design as you want it, even recolor it to sepia, black/white or negative. You can sharpen it or rotate it or flip it – great functionality. Once you save though, you can’t go back. There’s also a note to trust their designers for perfect placement – something I’m always skeptical of. I like to see the final product on-screen.
Step 3: Preview Card
Looks great! I’m again put off by the note that “On some browsers, the photo in the preview appears fractionally off center and some type weights vary slightly in appearance. However, on your printed card the photo will be perfectly positioned and type weights will match the sample cards.” But I like my card and the final product.
And the cards?
I received the cards really quickly – within a week. They’re beautiful. There’s a little logo on the back, which is standard in the industry. I’ll be proud to send them out to my friends and family.
The final price: 25 cards @ $1.98 each = $49.50 – and right now, they’re offering 25 free cards with every order - which brings the total down to about $1 per card. More than reasonable for custom photo cards
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365-cards.com was easy enough to use, affordable and offered a great selection of cards. They definitely need to build some more features and functions into their system to match the usability of the other big names in their market, but for a mom-and-pop shop, they have a great product at a great price.
About the author: One day, Andi hopes to teach the men in her life that they, too, can pick things up and put them away after they’ve used them. Read more from this author.No related posts.
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