WEB SERVICES - MISCELLANEOUS - 30.11.2015

Make your own business cards

MOO

MOO ( http://www.moo.com/uk ) is a popular service for designing and printing stickers, flyers and other marketing materials, it also has a Business Cards category. When we visited we found over 500 business card designs developed by MOO itself. You can filter them by sector (computing & IT, real estate, fashion, design & architecture, etc.), style (graphic, illustration or photographic), cards where you can add your company logo, designs where you can use your own photo or illustration, colour, etc. After clicking on a specific design, you can start customising the content. Interestingly, many of the MOO templates allow you to use different backgrounds within the same design, so you can create some variety in your business cards.

Price. The price depends on the number of cards, the paper used, the finish, etc. A standard set of 100 business cards printed on both sides (in colour) costs £21.98 ex. VAT. If you opt for the cheapest shipping method (seven business days), you should add £3.50 ex. VAT. This amounts to a total price of £0.30 inc. VAT per business card. The more cards you order, the lower the unit price will be. For all the prices, see http://www.moo.com/uk/help/faq/cost-calculator.html .

Vistaprint

Another popular supplier of business cards, posters, photo calendars and other marketing materials is Vistaprint ( http://www.vistaprint.co.uk ). It offers thousands of business card designs, which you can filter using broadly the same criteria as with MOO. Annoyingly, however, you have to pass via lots of other windows before finalising your order, and in the process Vistaprint tries to foist all kinds of extra products on you.

Price. For 100 two-sided colour business cards, we paid £23.98 inc. VAT, plus £3.59 for the cheapest delivery option (Economy - 14 business days). The unit price amounts to 27.5p.

Alternatives

Just google “business cards” and you will find countless other web services, both at home and abroad, which all promise you the nicest designs, the largest number of templates and the lowest prices. We therefore advise comparing the offer and the prices of multiple suppliers. During our search we also came across various temporary promotions which can save you money.

Print your own cards?

You could consider printing your business cards yourself on special paper using a quality printer. A good and simple tool for this purpose is Free PDF Cards ( http://www.freepdfcards.com ). Its layout options are limited, but it has a very user-friendly approach and you can integrate your own logo into your design. The result is a PDF page containing twelve cards which you have to cut manually. Also check out the different templates for your Office products ( http://templates.office.com ) such as Word and PowerPoint. Even more tips are provided by PC World ( http://www.pcworld.com/article/212196/print_customized_business_cards.html ).

Note. If you print your own business cards the quality will inevitably be lesser than when it’s done by a professional service.