Digitizing a Hand-Drawn Logo Scan

Indicating Social Media or Web Presence on Biz Cards: Keep the URLs

I’ve worked on a few biz cards in the last few weeks, and it’s reinforced my opinion on how to represent web properties on them: Keep the URLs spelled out. This is especially important if you think your business will gain from acquiring followers and online interactors; give them a way to find you!

I feel this way because there are times when I try to find a business on Facebook or Twitter through the search bar, because they’re doing the minimalist thing of just showing a Twitter icon on their card. The problem is: there are so many results that are close in name, but not the business’ page. When there are 2 billion FB accounts, there is going to be a lot of false positives. I understand having a lot of URLs listed on a card looks cluttered, so just list the most important few, or just one website that has clickable links to other important sites.

Getting as minimalist as possible with printed URLs

My wife ties a business card-like tag to boxes she ships her handmade dolls in. She had me turn it into an actual business card recently. She wants to buy 500 at a time, inexpensively, as opposed to till now–buying specialty printed stock every 100 dolls she sells.

I made this “style guide” for the tag maker last order, when the proofs weren’t what Holly wanted. Now that I look at it again, I’d be annoyed. Especially since the fonts I specified as adding 0.5px borders to “embolden” the words actually have thicker weight versions, and wouldn’t require a process of adding a border that the tag maker may not even be able to do with their software.

When I asked Holly how she wanted the tag-to-card conversion to look, she asked if we could get rid of all the URLs. I told her the same story, about trying to find businesses on Facebook with no URL. I think this is a good way to do it as minimalistic as possible:

• The first link is the “main link,” to her owned-domain website
  • which is a short-and-sweet url address (HollyDolls.com).
  • It’s spelled out in camel case, to emphasize readability,
  • and includes no unnecessary “https://www.” addressing noise.
  • Most importantly, if one goes to this site, links to the other urls (Etsy, Facebook, etc.) are prominently displayed. If you want to cut down on listing URLs, this is a way to list only one, and use it as a gateway to all others.

• The other links are spelled out using as few characters as possible because icons are used in place of the domain names. e.g.; an “Instagram” pictogram is used in place of spelling out “instagram.com”. Users who like the Instagram platform will usually understand what it means.
  • This also allows space saving when 2 or more icons can be used in a row, meaning the rest of the URL was obtained from each platform as the same (requiring a little forethought and availability ahead of time). e.g.; facebook.com/ and instagram.com/ can both be completed with HollysDolliesShop.
  • This was one of the shortest URL descriptors of Holly’s business we could find wide availability for on various platforms at the time. But doing the social media and other web presence addressing this we has obvious advantages of consistency and memorability.

Posting URLs may add Clutter, but it’s Good SEO

Good for Search Engine Optimization: post your social media URLs in as many places as possible because Google spiders may find and note the different websites pointing to your social network and website pages and decides if all these reputable sites are pointing to this business’ web properties, it may be a reputable firm, and perhaps they should be ranked higher in search results so more people looking for their services can find them!