Great greetings and simple navigation... what more can one ask from an egreeting site? And Hallmark.com delivers in spades.
When birthdays, holidays and special occasions come around there’s always a mad rush to go find a site that has greetings to suit varied tastes, from your staid boss to your freaky Beer-buddy. And the only site till date (apart from sugar3.com, who have gone pay-to-send sadly) who caters to all the moods is Hallmark.com
Since I have availed only the free ecard section, I cannot go into detail of any other of their offerings. Of course I’m MOST thankful that its still FREE and I hope it never gets pay-to-send like the others.
The section navigation is divided into 4 main categories : Upcoming Holidays, Milestones, Just a Note and Special Collections. Within these there are further sub-divisions that breakdown to specific occasions and reasons to send greetings online. Apart from the generic Birthdays and Thank You cards, Hallmark.com offers intuitive options like Encouragement and covers almost all ranges of holidays and religious/festive days.
The flash animations are smooth and load decently fast for my dial-up connection. The messages and ideas expressed by the scriptwriters are NOT the mushy-tear-jerking-hallmark-patent-sugary kinds. Most of course are sweet and endearing and some are downright silly and funky! I must add that the humor expressed is most appreciated by me.
3 supplementary services offered with the Free Ecard section are the : Hallmark Address Book, Event Reminder Service and Calendar.
-- The Address Book stores the email ID’s of all your loved one and you can set Reminders for each one’s Birthday or Anniversary etc.
-- The Event Reminder Service helps you keep track of all the important dates, that a person like me ALWAYS forgets!
-- The Calendar, displays the reminders set and up-coming events in date format that’s helpful when you need to know at a glance.
Another interesting thing that caught my eye is the section on their Card Collections. A numbers of productions are involved in the making of the greetings and this page talks about each individually.
The only drawback is that the site tends to get lethargic around popular event days like Christmas or Valentines Day.
All in all I have found it always a rewarding experience to hunt and find the perfect ecard to suit the temperaments of all of my varied loved ones!
Kudos Hallmark.com