Thursday, October 30, 2008

Green Halloween

It's not too late to have a Green Halloween. Drop by GreenHalloween.org to check out all the amazing information they have on helping you go green for Halloween, plus they have several contests to enter including costume contests, pumpkin carving contests, and green Halloween craft contests.

If you would like to get some how-to information on a couple of my green Halloween crafts drop by EcoChildsPlay.com to get directions to make my batty yogurt cup creation or Green Halloween to get the directions on my bejeweled black cat.

Send Last Minute Halloween Greetings

Month2Month.com Launches the First Totally Personalized e-Cards

…Senders can stamp their own personalities on free, high-quality cards at an ad-free site

Month2Month.com, a young e-card Web site, announced today it is launching the first e-cards that senders can completely personalize as their own rather than using an e-card company’s name. This new service offers several important innovations and features that other e-card companies do not:


  • Cards can be easily personalized with the sender’s own name or brand instead of the commercial logo of the e-card company. All of the company’s Halloween cards now have this feature, which will be rolled out to include all of Month2Month.com’s cards in the coming weeks.

  • The site has no advertising of any kind. Month2Month.com is convinced that many people stopped sending e-cards because they either had to pay for them or put up with annoying, intrusive advertising, on both the sender and the recipient ends.

  • The cards themselves bear no company or site logo to commercialize them. Senders can feel proud to stamp their own personalities and sign their own names on these cards.

  • Senders can choose which cards they want to personalize from a wide variety of cards. They can even change the card sentiment from “Merry Christmas” to “Happy Holidays” or “You Are Invited” to suit their needs.

  • All of the cards on the site are free, not just a limited group, and there is no registration required or personal information gathered for later use.

“We have focused all of our efforts to make sure that both senders and recipients of the card have the best possible experience,” explained Month2Month.com CEO John Aslanian. “This includes everything from the size of the cards (ours are larger and fill more of the screen), to the design, to the Web site itself. We want to greet our site visitors with top-notch cards in one of the last few commercial spaces on the web free of annoying, intrusive advertising, which we feel takes away from the meaning and warmth of the card.”

Aslanian said he created the Web site because he was appalled at the poor quality and unimaginative products he saw at other card sites, both paid and free, and thought there was a great need in the market for top-quality free cards. “One of my biggest pet peeves is being shown irrelevant ads while looking for cards, only to find they aren’t worth the wait, or the best ones aren’t free. Even if you pay, the quality is not great.”

On any given weekday, animators manipulate images of haunted hayrides, garden scenes, or dancing cowboys in the sunny loft studio of the company’s headquarters in quiet Port Chester , N.Y. Producing the cards can be laborious; each card can take up to six weeks to make, as opposed to just a few days at larger companies. And the rewards of taking such pains to create just one card are obvious: in an independently-conducted market research survey, 90% of users surveyed said the cards were better than well-known, paid, big-brand card sites.

The cards are all made in-house and never outsourced to freelancers. “This is an extremely rare practice that speaks to our conviction that the assembly line e-cards put out by large corporations have lost their spark,” Aslanian said. “Our new site reflects our commitment to providing users with a better way to say ‘Boo!,’ ‘I love you,’ or ‘Happy Holidays’ on the Web. We want users to see our cards as good enough to deserve their own names.”

To use the company’s free e-cards, visit http://www.Month2Month.com .