Well as promised here is another post about my adventures on café press (cafepress to some search terms . . . See the first one here:)
http://justinlocke.typepad.com/art_and_commerce_justin_l/2008/10/adventure-in-ca.html
Well what started out as an intention to do one or two t-shirts using existing artwork has turned into a near creative obsession. I keep coming up with ideas to put on t-shirts.
So a few things I learned,
1) When setting up your shop, give some thought as to the ID name, I didn’t and now it’s justinlocke2, and I think I could have come up with a better “brand” name than that, but with over 1500 pages views I can’t change it now.
2) They have a “custom html” section but what they don’t tell you is, that some of the most important html, i.e. your meta tags and keywords, are created in the “shop name” section. (Phone help at CP is no use on this, but someone in the community forum saved me.)
3) It takes 60 days to get paid.
Also for me, as I do mostly text-based designs, I have to upload different versions, with light and dark font colors, to go on different colored shirts, and the process is very tedious. You have to go thru and check off various boxes to change the image on this or that shirt– very time consuming and a pain as I have to do it over and over again with each design section. Hopefully someday cafepress will recognize this and make it easier to do. Rearranging orders is also very clunky, I am getting carpal tunnel clicking my mouse dozens of times to move an item up or down in the order.
Also I discovered that the monthly fee covers one storefront only, so if your product selection expands to distinctly different types of customers as mine is, you may have to buy another shop for another $5 a month.
I am slowly learning how to customize my shop look, although it is taking a while. I am pretty good at html, but redoing their standard templates is tricky and sometimes you just can’t change things.
What I will probably end up doing is a custom page on my own website that merely links to the café press site for purchases, that way I can control more of the content/presentation. Right now, I am stuck with their banner and columns on right.
It is quite the learning curve. When I have more designs up I may finally have time and mental energy to cope with doing more customization of my storefront.
www.cafepress.com/justinlocke2
