With the holidays upon us, and money being stretched thin, you may be looking at your options for sending more environmentally friendly and less costly season's greetings. One option is creating an e-card and sending it out either via email or posting it through a social networking site. There are two options and a myriad of service providers offering both paid and free alternatives.
Option 1: Send Customize Existing Templates
There is no shortage of sites offering the ability to send e-cards. In these cases, there is no need for any special software other than what is required to connect to and surf the web. For example:
Myecardsonline
123greatings
Hallmark
evite
In addition, many sites that allow you to upload and develop photos on-line will also provide this service. For example:
Costco
Shutterfly
Option 2: Create A Card On Your Own
To do this you will need some sort of software. This can be as simple as using MS Word and playing around with fonts and dropping in clip art or photos, or using some sort of image editing software such as PhotoShop, or Paint Shop Pro. In addition to applications which can be purchased there is an assortment of quality freeware applications which can be downloaded off the Internet. Consider, too, that if you have a digital camera, it probably came with some software that may be useful for this purpose.
For the most part, many of these applications work on the same premise and can be muddled through even by a novice. Many of the functions are icon driven and images are universal so selection and cropping tools look more or less the same regardless of what you are using. My taking advantage of help text and hovering over icons it is possible to teach yourself the basics of any image editing app.
It is important to remember that the size of the ecard will affect how quickly it can be sent over email, and downloaded by the recipients. The biggest culprits are photographs. Since they are not intended for printing, it is sufficient to reduce resolution to 72dpi. The size of the image can also be reduced to no larger than 800 x 600 ppi. Once complete, the card should be saved to JPG format and can be sent as a simple email attachment.
Don't Be A Martyr
If graphics software is not something that you have had a lot of experience with it may not be worth it to try doing this the hard way. Investigate e-card service providers before trying to recreate the wheel.
