Once you’ve decided what to put on your business cards, you still have plenty of decisions left to make. Are you going to design them yourself or get a professional? Are you going to print them on a home printer, in a shop, or order them over the web? All these questions tie together in various ways to make a surprisingly complicated decision. What you choose will ultimately depend on what your priorities are.

When it comes to whether you should hire a designer to design your business cards, don’t get pressured into doing anything you don’t want to do. On the one hand, business cards with stupid fonts and terrible clipart can easily put people off you – but on the other hand, if you keep your card plain and conservative, but still use bold shapes and colours, you can produce something very good even on a DIY system.

If you go to a shop you may find yourself pressured into hiring a pro, while if you order over the web, you’re more likely to find an easy interface that will produce your cards for you. Some online ordering sites even have special flash interfaces that will guide you through adding colours, choosing appropriate fonts, putting the right details in the right place and all the rest of it. These services can often be very good value for money, considering that they also tend to do the actual printing cheaper than a shop.

However, the downside of not using an actual, physical print shop is that you may have to wait a few weeks for your business cards to turn up – and it’s always in those few weeks that you’re left wishing you had some cards. For my money, the best solution is to get your business cards made online on the cheap using an easy web interface, and then use temporary, home-made cards until the real ones turn up.