Business Cards are an important part of your corporate image. Many times, I find small businesses try to save money on printing their business cards by designing and printing them themselves, which can be a big mistake…

Your business card is the visual reminder of you and your company. By designing your business card yourself (if you’re not a designer), you can end up designing something that is more pleasing for you than your clients. By not following some specific guidelines when designing the business card, you will not be able to send the file to a professional printer. Important factors and terms you may hear are “bleeds”, “PMS colours”, “margins” etc- all these contribute to the output of a professionally designed card.

I once had a client who designed their own business card in Microsoft Publisher and sent me the file for printing. First of all, I don’t know any designers (professional designers, that is) who use Microsoft Publisher to design anything, let alone business cards! This meant our designer had to re-build the card from scratch which meant the client had just wasted 2 hours of their time for absolutely no reason.

Many printing houses will not work with the general public. Our printer, for example, regularly turns down jobs from people who found their website. I once asked my contact there why she would refuse business? Her answer made complete sense: when people (not businesses) contact her for a quote, they are usually looking for small quantities, like 250 business cards, maybe 500. Small quantities always cost more to print, as printing houses benefit from economies of scale- the more you do, the less it costs to do. This results in small printing job quotes being higher than they need to be. By dealing only with businesses, the printing house takes on more than one job from that company, so both the company (and hopefully) the end client benefits from lower printing costs. These savings are passed down to the clients; at least they are with our firm!

In short, I suggest to try and save money elsewhere in your business, but definitely NOT in your marketing and corporate image… remember: you only have one chance to make a first impression.

Editable websites, or Content Management Systems (CMS) are tools that allow the client to keep their websites up to date themselves, without having to know website coding. I like to call them editable websites, simply because non- technical people get confused with “Content Management Systems”.

Editable websites are an excellent solution for people who need to keep their website content up to date, on a frequent basis. The issue with normal HTML websites (from the client’s point of view) is that they can become expensive to maintain and keep up to date, as they need to contact a developer to update the content, who may charge anywhere between $40-$120/hr! This means you are constantly paying for your website! I believe it makes much more sense to pay for your website once, then use the money you would have paid a developer (to update your site) on something you need at that time- like print advertising, monthly costs of running your business, etc.

One question/comments get frequently are: “How is it different”? “how does it work”? “sounds complicated, I don’t think i’ll be able to manage it myself”…

the way an editable website works is actually quite simple. The developer takes the design work for the website (either the finished HTML pages or the slices of the web page) and feeds them into an online database. This database is programmed to take the design elements and throw together pages (which allows you to create a new page in seconds), move the design frame down to allow the page to grow when you add more content, and most importantly, allows you to edit the content on the pages.

The page editor is a tool that allows you to manage the content on each page via an easy to use interface. We, for example, build our client page editors to look a lot like Microsoft Word- this is to make it more familiar to the user. All you need to do is log into the admin area of your website (it is protected of course; you don’t want anyone and everyone changing your website content!) click on the page editor function (or sometimes on the page name, it all depends on how your system was built) and begin changing content. When done, you click save and voila! the updated content is now displayed on your website.

Editable websites are more expensive than simple HTML websites. This is because there are 2 types of developers involved- a designer and a programmer. However, your actual per page cost of development is MUCH lower compared to HTML, as the designer just needs to design 1-2 page layouts, and the database will use these to create the new pages. With HTML, the designer needs to create each and every page, which can be expensive. If you are looking to save money in the long run, then an editable website is the best choice. Not only do you never have to pay anyone for website updates again, you control when the update is done… (clients of ours who have worked with other firms and developers understand what I mean about control) Many firms do not give simple updates a priority in their production schedule, so clients end up waiting days, if not weeks, for their simple update to be done.