The Business Card Club - Main Features
There are three main parts to this website. You can look for cards, add a card yourself or browse the available selections.
The Card Finder
Our Card Finder is a sophisticated search feature that allows you to look for cards by the name on the card, by its geographical location, by the type of business or by any combination of all three. As you type or click on the keys provided the system reacts dynamically, to offer you other relevant keys and tell you how may cards your selection will return.
Managing selections
A selection is a set of cards that all conform to the same category or categories. For example, all cards from Michigan where one of the tags is "electrician", or all restaurants in Paris. Selections are built interactively using our Card Finder but can additionally be saved with any name of your choosing.
Your selections are listed in the menu panel on the main cards page and are private to you alone (nobody else can see them). When you click a selection name, only cards meeting the specified criteria will be displayed.
For more information about selections, click here.
Adding cards
To add your card, fill in as many of the form fields as you need and choose an image; typically the original artwork or a scan of your present business card. Any mistakes can be corrected later. You can choose when to make your card public so any user of The Business Card Club - worldwide - can find it using the information you provide.
If you do not have the original artwork or a scanner, a digital camera will produce a perfectly acceptable image. It's advisable to trim the result for best readability, so if you don't know how to use an image editing program you may need to get a knowledgeable friend to do it for you.
Alternatively you can use our built-in Card Designer, which lets you choose from a selection of background images and add text to it to make your own business card.
The Browser
The main Browser page of The Business Card Club comprises a menu bar on the left and a large panel on the right containing thumbnail images of business cards. As you move your mouse pointer over the thumbnails a description of each one appears in a pop-up panel. When you click the thumbnail you go to the page for that card, with a full-sized picture of the card. Buttons are arranged round the picture to allow you to edit the card details, send an email, go to the card's website and link the card to other cards (see Linking cards).
Some cards have extra information available when you click the card image. This can be text, pictures or even a video clip.
Until you log in the menu only has a few items in it. Logging in is simple; you just give your email address and a password. The first time you do this you are joining The Business Card Club, which creates a user record for you. Once you are a member you can upload cards and manage selections.
Linking cards
This is a mechanism for setting up one-way relationships between cards, and it works like this. Suppose you run a restaurant. You might want to link your card to those of nearby theatres or night-clubs, so that visitors to your card can follow the links and discover what else they can enjoy near you. It's possible some of your customers might like to link themselves to you, so their friends can see where they like to eat out. The process works in reverse too, so people can find out who eats at your restaurant. Be aware this is a public system and it may result in an unexpected number of emails. If you're a business this may be good if it finds you more customers.
Each time you make a link from your card to someone else's you are asked to type a short text message explaining why you made the link. Anyone who visits the links page can discover the cards linked to and linked from, and can follow the links. This can sometimes result in surprising discoveries.
