Artryst.com: Design by Gregory Tarnoff

New Features

I have been hard at work this weekend adding a few new features. I now have an about page, I have added a contact form with “New And Improved Spam Fighting Goodness,” and I finally got the Cafepress store up and running. You can find links to it on the Emperor’s New Clothing tab up top. Here is a sample of what I have up there now.
For those that don’t know, Cafepress is a great solution for people who don’t have several thousands of dollars and hours of free time to print, pick, pack, and ship our own hand made shirts. They provide quality shirts, hats, mugs, calendars and other items with your artwork printed on it. They charge for the the product and the printing and you place a fee for your your artwork. This sounds like typical fare, in that you would pay a printer to print shirts and then charge a retailer a larger amount and you get to keep the difference.

Well in the Cafepress world, there is no inventory that you have to shell out for. They do on demand printing. If one t-shirt is sold, that is all they print. They offer up heat transfer or direct printing. Screen printing would be better, but you will pay more as you will have to carry inventory. for the small start up Cafepress rocks. Further more, they handle all the ecommerce and have a huge collection of products to shop through if you are looking for something to buy. I definitely recommend checking them out, better yet, buy one of my shirts and then check them out.

Search Engine Optimization

Do not fall for anyone approaching you to optimize your site for search engines. This is my warning to you. any well built, standards based site with quality content will have all the necessary elements to drive traffic to your site without the optimization they speak of.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the snake oil of the 21st century. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people on the web offer SEO services. Typically they give you an ambiguous proposal, that states they will optimize your site, submit it to the search engines X times a month for the duration of the contract, they will submit it to Y number of search engines, and they will get you backlinks from Z sites . Then you pay them $400 per month for a 12 month period to do all this work, and you might find your site at the top for a couple weeks, but then it magically disappears. more »