RedMallorca LAB

We recently discussed how to go about scanning QR codes on the iPhone with the help of a free third party app called Scan. But if you’ve ever wondered where QR Codes come from or how to make one yourself, then you might be pleased to find out that not only can Scan read QR codes, but the service can actually make them as well.

It turns out you don’t even need the app to create the codes, all you need is a web browser, and it doesn’t matter what operating system it’s running on, so whether you’re on an iPhone, iPad, Linux, Windows, OS X, or Mac OS 7, you can follow along and make a QR code for something.

Making QR Codes

Using the Scan.Me website we can quickly make a QR code completely for free. The QR code actions can cover a variety of things, ranging from accessing a business or personal page, website, social media interaction like sending a tweet or Liking a page, displaying a message, or even joining a password protected wi-fi network. We’ll focus on creating a QR code for redirecting to a website, but each of the other options at ScanMe is as simple to configure.

Here’s all you need to do to make a QR code redirect to a website:

• Go to Scan’s QR Code Generator
• Choose “Website” (or another option, if you’d like)

• Enter the URL to send the QR scan to, click “Preview” to see a rough idea of what it will look like
• Create a login (free) to ScanMe to complete the QR Code creation – signing up for the free login is handy because you’ll get analytics about scans, and allows you to change the QR code if you want later
• Next, enter a title, header and footer text, and adjust the QR code color and shape if desired, the live preview will show you what it looks like, but choose “Submit” to finalize and create your qr code

Your QR code will look something like this, affectionately called ‘robot barf’ by some:

At this point you can either save the QR code as an image like a PNG and print it our, send it to your friends, or do whatever you want with it. If it’s scanned by the Scan app or any other QR code reader, it will redirect to the website you specified when setting it up. Yes it really is that easy, which seems to surprise a lot of people. Try it out yourself.