How to Design Your Own T-Shirt Site
Designing your own T-shirt site has a few key advantages, the first being that you can make some good residual income from selling T-shirts with your own designs, and the second is that designing your own website as opposed to using one that is pre-made will help you to stand out from all other websites that sell T-shirts online. With the advent of Zazzle and Cafe Press, just about anyone can sell T-shirts. The trick is using these two opportunities and others like them to help you design your own T-shirt website.
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Things You'll Need
- Website host
- Domain name
- Zazzle or Cafe Press account
- Understanding of basic HTML and/or CSS code
Instructions
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Choose a website host, and sign up. While you can choose to pay for hosting, a few good website hosts--such as 110mb, for example--don't have forced advertising.
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Select a domain name. Choose something that reflects the kind of designs you'll be using on your T-shirts but that is still different enough that the domain name won't be one that has already been taken.
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Purchase your domain name.
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Add your domain name to your website. You can do this in the account-management section of your website host.
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Create several different designs for your T-shirts. You can do this using free graphics programs such as GIMP and Paint.net. If you like 3D digital art, you might consider using the free 3D art program Daz Studio.
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Go to Zazzle and open an account. Select the T-shirt styles and colors you want to add to your T-shirt site.
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Add your T-shirt designs to the T-shirt styles you selected at Zazzle until you are done.
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Go to Cafe Press and open an account. Go through its T-shirt styles and colors, and select any that you like that were not offered at Zazzle. Make sure you select different ones and not ones that look a lot alike.
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Add your designs to your selections at Cafe Press until you are done.
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Select the different categories of T-shirts you will have for sale based on your designs.
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Set up your index page for your website and a page for each category. This is where you can use your HTML and/or CSS skills or use a template. However, you need to have the bare bones of these website pages, including any navigation buttons and a background, done.
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Create two folders on your desktop: one for Zazzle T-shirts and one for Cafe Press t-shirts.
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Go to Zazzle and sign into your account. Go to the main page for each individual T-shirt for which you created a design and save the best picture of the T-shirt to your Zazzle folder on your desktop. Do this for all the T-shirts you've designed using Zazzle.
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Go to Cafe Press and sign into your account. Repeat the process of saving the best picture of each of your T-shirts to the folder on your desktop.
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Upload the contents of both your Zazzle and Cafe Press folders to an image-hosting website like Photobucket.
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Go to each category page and, using HTML, add the photos of the T-shirts that fit that category. Make them link to their main sales page at Zazzle and/or Cafe Press so that when someone clicks on the picture he is taken directly to where to buy your T-shirt. Repeat this for each category page.
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Flesh out your index page with a welcoming message that makes people want to buy, and a few T-shirt examples so they'll want to check out the other categories.
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Check all the links to make sure they work properly and that you have navigation buttons for all your pages. Once this is completed, you are ready to begin advertising your new T-shirt site and selling T-shirts.
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Tips & Warnings
Once your website is complete, advertise it on free classified websites such as Craigslist. Add a link to your T-shirt site from any other websites you have, and ask your friends and family to post a link on their websites. Add a social bookmarking button to each page of your website so those visiting can use it. This will help get more traffic to your website.
While you can use the little store that you set up on Cafe Press and/or Zazzle, it isn't recommended. Zazzle does allow a little more customization than Cafe Press does, but you will be taken more seriously if you have your own website and domain name.
Resources
- Photo Credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/blazerman/177165473/
