Home | About | Contact

I can still build it

---

It's been almost a year now since I last updated you on my T-Shirt project, and I thought now was as good of a time as any. Actually, I've been doing a lot and not recording it all here like I said I would. But first things first, lets talk T-Shirts and tee shirt nut is the site we are referencing.

If you remember right, I wanted to "practice" or test some search practices that I had been throwing around for a while, and I thought testing them out on a highly competitive market like T-Shirt design and sales would be a great first start. As it has turned out, it has been a great first start, and not only didn't I learn a great deal about shirt design, but I learned even more about building a customer base and making them feel more important than anything else going on in the world. At the end of the day it's all about customer satisfaction and has little to do with how great your product is or even how great your site is. If you give the customer great service and make them feel connected to you, then you will have created the greatest single advertisement you could ask for. But with all that said, I did learn some technical pieces as well, which is really what this post is all about. Right?

Google Knows Best One thing that became very clear to me, is that good does know what's best for their own search engine and you might as well follow the advice they give you. For anyone developing a site, the webmaster tools are essential to at least understand. It might be difficult to hit 100% of them, but a majority should at least be put into your architecture.

Make Good Links We all know that getting others to share your link is the key to much success, but what we must also think about, is how easy we make it for the user to share things. I've learned that having multiple "call outs" for a like button are important. Not only do you want the domain to get a lot of attention, but you want the individual pages to get attention as well. Deep linking is important, and as the search engines get more advanced, the more relevant content the better your results.

Update Often The days I saw my ranking grow the most, were those days that something catchy was posted, or for some unknown reason twitter seemed to be buzzing. The search engines love to see your content changing, but what they like just as much is content that people seem to read and spread around. Making your site viral is the key to continued high ranking.

Pay Attention to Analytics I used google analytics and it seems to be one of the most full featured analytic tools on the market. There are others that offer some highly customizable dashboards and reports that google doesn't provide, but I haven't found anything yet that I can do with this tool. Simply awesome.

Get Feedback Probably the most important thing that I learned was how to make the site better with feedback from the people that will use it the most. The target customer. If you ask them, they will respond, it's really that simple. Ask and you will receive.

There are a ton of other things that go into making a site successful, and I don't think anyone can tell you straight away the one particular thing or a handful of things will make you successful. However I've found there is one KEY ingredient, and that's to have a site the people actually want to go to. It has to be interesting and there has to be a reason to come back for more. If you don't provide that, you've become the one hit wonder of the web, and nobody wants that.

Current Projects

In Production