The same three tools — a short link, a QR code, and a bio page — get used very differently depending on what you do. These guides cover the specifics for ten industries.
A restaurant and a hospital both put QR codes on printed material, but almost nothing else about the two setups is alike. A menu code is scanned dozens of times a day by people sitting three feet away in poor lighting, and it needs to survive a menu change without a reprint. A patient intake code is scanned once per visit, has to work for someone who may be unfamiliar with scanning at all, and carries privacy expectations a menu never does. Advice written generically for "businesses" tends to be useless at exactly the point where those differences start to matter.
Each guide below is written around one industry's actual constraints: where the code physically goes, how big it has to be printed, what happens when the destination changes, and which numbers are worth watching afterwards. Several also cover the static versus dynamic question, because getting that wrong is the single most expensive mistake in printed QR codes — a static code cannot be repointed once it is on a sign.
If you would rather browse by what you are trying to do than by what industry you are in, the use-case guides cover the same ground organized by channel — packaging, business cards, event badges, vehicle signage, print ads — and the how-to guides give the step-by-step versions.
Three mistakes show up across all ten guides. Printing a code too small for the scanning distance is the most common — a code read from across a room needs to be far larger than one read from a table, and the usual failure is sizing it to look tidy in the design file rather than to work in the room. Placing it where a phone cannot comfortably reach is the second: codes on floor-level signage, behind glass with heavy glare, or above head height get ignored regardless of how well they scan in testing.
The third is skipping the fallback. Not everyone will scan — some phones are old, some hands are full, some people simply prefer typing. A short, readable link printed underneath the code costs nothing and captures the people the code loses. That is also where a branded short domain earns its keep, since a link someone can actually remember and type later is worth more than a random string.