Excuse me while I rant a bit about VistaPrint...
Many people know VistaPrint as a great company for helping small business owners get print materials for a low cost. But did you know VistaPrint also makes websites now? Maybe you did but I recently found out. My first reaction was happily surprised. VistaPrint is a great resource for small business owners. They can have a one-stop shop for all their marketing needs which empowers all small business owners.
My joy quickly went away when I started to use their web editor. At this moment, I can say--without a doubt--that I depise VistaPrint and their website editor. Here's why:
Lack of Quality Control I understand that it is difficult to make sure every print request looks perfect especially when you're a large corporation but do you even try? Maybe I am just unlucky and I got a bad batch. But, as a corporation, your main focus should be consumers who utilize your service. I personally feel that VistaPrint cares more about quantity than they do about the quality of their work. I believe the simple solution would be to send your customer's a hard copy sample of their print job before printing the entire job. If money is an issue then you can allow consumers to deny a print sample.
Lack of Customization One of the things that has always bothered me about VistaPrint is the check out. As most of you know, when you are in the process of checking out you are presented with a lot more buying options. Each of these options show a whatever image you uploaded for your business card on every design. For some of the options, it looks pretty cool such as business card holders and mug. However, other things such as banners and car sticker, the image is either really small and does not work for a large scale print job or it is too stretch out and pixelated. Consumer should be allowed to upload another image without effecting the order that is already in progress. Another simple solution, is to not show those options if the image is not a high enough quality or large enough. Instead, once check out is complete, you can give the consumer the option to redirect to more options. Moreover, when printing you are not giving a lot of control over your print request. For example, you can choose "special paper" but you don't know what type of paper. You can also choose how thick the paper is and whether it is coated or matte but not the texture of the paper. For some, this does not matter but, for designer, it would be a cool feature to have. However, this issue carries over to their web editor.
Web Editor Just Sucks. As I previously said, I thought it would be cool that VistaPrint had a web editor--I was wrong. The web editor is terrible and difficult to work with. However, it can give a person with no web knowledge a decent website. Here are some of the things that made me finally hate VistaPrint:
I randomly got kicked off for no reason multiple times
While in the editor, I was unable to add html to an element on my own
You can only drag and drop boxes and once you do you can't edit the box content just the text
Lacks basic things that are very trendy elements to have on other successful pages
Unable and/or very difficult to hyperlink images, link hovers, adding buttons, placing an image where you want, installing widgets, adding text boxes where you want, adjusting a textbox length
Let me end this rant before it gets any worse. I am not trying to tell you what to use but please explore different print options. There are typically print places your local area that are more than happy to print your designs.