How to make a visually attractive QR code

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QR codes enable website linking from mobile phones. And are a simple way to connect your prospects to your physical marketing materials.

They are butt-ugly.

Who wants to ruin a nice design with a pixellated image plonked down in the corner of the page?

We’ve found easy ways to improve the look of QR.

Unitag QR Code Generator Review

Unitag Live is a website that lets you create and customise QR codes in a huge variety of ways. More free online QR code generators have limited customisation but Unitag lets you add your logo into the code, change the corner images and alter the colours.

Unitag Live Features

Unitag Live Features

The first step in the QR code creation process is picking the website your QR code will link users to. You can send them to a location using the GPS on their scanner or tell their smartphone to instantly call a number. You can even have the QR code call in a business card for the user to look at.

Once you’ve directed users to the right content you can start customising the look of your QR code. Unitag has several predefined template ideas, but gives you the power to alter every aspect of your QR code in a variety of ways.

  • Colors (American spelling) – allows you to modify the QR code colour. You can also blend two colours into the QR code which gives a shaded rainbow effect across it.
  • Look – this modifies the shape and style of the corners and main section of your QR code. The main section refers to the dots that make up the code.
  • Logo – uploading a photo here places that uploaded image in the center of your QR code. Large files cannot be uploaded however so you’ll have to save big images as smaller ones (e.g. reduce the size in powerpoint and re-save it as another picture).
  • Eyes – this feature changes the colour of the inside and outside of the corners on your QR code.
  • Options – here you can change the background colour of your QR code, it’s shading and the quality of the image (the size). Be wary of altering this too much because if the background colour clashes with the QR code colour then the QR code cannot be read by scanners (e.g. dark purple QR codes on a dark blue background will not work).

You can also pay a yearly fee to get extended features from Unitag including:

  • 1 or more mobile websites
  • QR Codes management and storing
  • High resolution exporting
  • Template management
  • Batch generation
  • Editable QR Code content
  • Tracking & analytics
  • Intelligent filter (e.g. different languages)
  • Multi-user accounts
  • Statistics per campaign
  • XLS and CSV export for statistics

Definitely explore the higher level plans if you run marketing campaigns that require heavy statistics tracking. Website clickthroughs and tracking on Google Analytics would more than likely track the same statistics, however.

If you’re looking for a simpler QR code creator online you can also try:

Just to give you an idea of what these codes look like and are capable of, here’s one that leads back to the Creative Agency Secrets homepage!

 CAS QR CODE

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DashThis Analytics Website

User Review of DashThis.com

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DashThis Analytics Website

If you’re looking to keep track of multiple social media pages or for a way to track the success of a campaign you’re running you might want to look at DashThis. With DashThis you add in links to your persona around the web (like your Twitter or Facebook account) and then create a “dashboard” of information about them. We recently reviewed DashThis for a client and this is our analysis:

How DashThis worksDashThis Main Account Page

As an analytics tool DashThis provides in-depth reports on your pages using devices called “DASHBOARDS”. You get acertain number of dashboards per month but can swap them for different periods or social media links, essentially re-using them. Once you have loaded in your page (e.g. Facebook) you can select it when you next create a dashboard. You can customise these dashboards to show the information you want, but you cannot seem to take it further than that and must use what they have built in.

As an example, Facebook pages get stats tracking for things including:

  • DashThis Facebook OptionsFan/ like count and increase over your chosen period
  • Fans added / new likes over your chosen period
  • Page impressions (views/ reach) over your chosen period
  • How many impressions were viral over your chosen period
  • Page interactions (comments, post likes, etc)
  • Top posts (by various groups e.g. engaged users) over your chosen period
  • Number of people talking about you over your chosen period
  • Number of stories about you over your chosen period
  • etc

Dashboards are versatile and can be used for a variety of statistics. The rolling dashboards are for instant statistics. Periodic reports do just that, report across a set period. Campaign dashboards follow the response your activities have gathered over a given period. This gives DashThis a wider variety of applications outside of just tracking social media page statistics.

Your account

The FREE account ends in just two weeks, which you can extend to a month by sharing DashThis.com otherwise your account will become inactive. From then on you have to pay a monthly fee where you get a number of dashboards starting at 1 dashboard for $19, then 3 for $39, 10 for $99 and so on. This means you can only have a certain number of dashboards active at any one time but you can delete one and recreate it for another page. In that way you could start with 1 dashboard and check a series of reports daily, although this could become time consuming.

Who would DashThis be good for?

DashThis is a comprehensive statistics tracking tool suitable for businesses managing a wide variety of pages, particularly social media pages. In some cases pages have their own tracking systems (such as Facebook on company pages) so if a business has a limited number of pages to track, having them all in one place won’t do them much good.

What DashThis Supports

The picture above shows the multitude of pages DashThis supports, including a new way to view Google Analytics.

If you’re a company overwhelmed by statistics tracking on multiple pages you’ll want to give DashThis a trial run. If you already have your analytics figured out it’s best to give this one a miss.

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