Last week, a few of us were discussing the merits of paper cards vs. e-cards for Rosh Hashana. Although I love receiving “real” cards – especially since we use them to decorate our Sukkah – I completely appreciate the benefits of e-cards. In fact, I intend to send some myself this year.
One option for e-cards is simply to take a photo and email it to all your friends and family with a Rosh Hashana greeting. But for only slightly more effort – and still zero out of pocket cost – you can actually make an animated e-card using Smilebox.
I first used Smilebox about a year and a half ago to make the invites to my daughter’s 1st birthday party. Smilebox is an online scrapbooking program, which also offers preset designs for cards, newsletters, slide shows and more. They even have a few cute themes for Rosh Hashana!
While I’m certain that someone more creative and crafty than I am could make something absolutely brilliant on Smilebox, I’m quite pleased with the results of my card – especially since it took me all of 5 minutes to put together. (Click the play arrow to see the card in action!)
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| Create a greeting card |
(By the way, for my “real” Smilebox card, I will include a picture of all five of us… and one that isn’t 18 months out of date. But I did this quick mock-up from a shot on my desktop to give you a good idea of what you can do with Smilebox.)
Smilebox has both a free membership and a paid membership. With both of them, you download the software to your desktop and then work offline to create your card. (The music is totally optional, but my kids liked it, so I left it on.)
My mock-up was done on the FREE membership – and, as you can tell, you can share it on a blog or your Facebook page. Or, as I plan to do with our cards, you can email it. Smilebox even links up to your email address book (if you want it to), so you can just quickly go down the list and select the recipients rather than having to cut and paste 100 addresses.
As far as I can tell, there are two small drawbacks to the free membership: (1) your card will have one (very short) ad played at the beginning and (2) you can’t print a hard copy of your card. If either of those things are really critical to you, you can always elect to upgrade to a paid membership, which is $5.99 a month or $34.99 for the year. You can also do a free 14-day trial (which would be more than enough time to get your RH card sent out… just sayin’.)
So now that I’ve shared my super stealth way of making my very own ecard, I just have one request: If you decide to make a Smilebox card, I sure hope I’ll be included on your distribution list!
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