I love that the internet gives me access to thousands and thousands of cool t-shirt designs. I’ve found some of the funniest, hippest, most cutting-edge designs online and ordered them with the click of a mouse. And, when all else fails, t-shirts are the best gift option out there. Everyone wears t-shirts.

Have you ever wished that you had a way to put one of your signature pithy sayings onto a t-shirt? Or, maybe you have a great design in mind, but no way to actually get it onto a t-shirt? I’m looking at an amazing concept right now on the BlueCotton website. They have a tool called Design Studio.

Design Studio lets you design your own t-shirts. You choose from an array of clipart, fonts, effects, and colors. You cam move elements around, resize them, mess with the color schemes, just about anything you can think of. In the end, you come away with a design as unique as you are. You can use it to make a cool logo shirt for a fundraiser, a design for a special birthday, custom fraternity t-shirts, a saucy slogan for your girls’ weekend out, or anything else you can dream. The possibilities are endless.

Give Design Studio a try, especially if you have a Christmas gift you’re stuck on. This is the perfect gift solution for absolutely anyone.

This one is for all of you small business owners who find their way to my blog. I have a mailing list with over 1000 members who are nearly all small online business owners, and I understand the struggle to make a mark online. I see how competitive the market place can be and how important affordable, effective advertising is if you want to rise above the rest.

Google and Yahoo Are Expensive
Are you looking for a way to advertise online in the highly competitive PPP (pay per click) environment? Sometimes it might not seem like it, but there actually is a world outside of Google and Yahoo when it comes to the world of PPC. Adknowledge’s BidSystem can run text ads at up to 30% less than the Google Adwords or Yahoo network prices. Their system has click fraud prevention measures and you do not pay for low converting users, which removes a lot of the risk of PPC advertising.

Why Contextual Advertising?
Contextual advertising is the current online trend and it seems to be the best bet, because you’re ensured that your ad is being displayed to users who are interested in similar content and topics. If a user does a search for Florida beaches and sees ads for a Florida hotel or travel agency on the resulting site, they are more likely to click on the ads since they arrived at the site already interested in the subject matter.

Try This
If you want to see how BidSystm will work for your advertising needs, now is a good time to give them a try. If you sign up now they will give you $50 in FREE PPC Advertising. You can’t lose with a bonus like that.

I have mailing list of over 100 people who are all involved in one way or another in the business of hair accessories. There are hobbyists who only sell to friends, small businesses in their local communities, and big online retailers. We all have the same goal and share a lot of information.

One thing the members of the group are great about is helping one in another in brainstorming things like business names and logo ideas. So, I see a lot of those logos bandies about. I have a couple tips that I would like to share, because all too often the logos I see people choosing to use in the end are complicated, multi-colored designs.

1. Make sure your logo is just as attractive and easy to recognize if it is printed in straight black and white – no grey, no half tones, nothing except solid black and white. There will come a time you want a simple version of your logo for invoices or low-cost flyers. When you get into color, costs go up, so you want to always have a b/w option.

2. Use clean lines and simple designs. Think about what your logo might look like if you need to shrink it down to a 1-inch square. What does it look like if you make a copy of a copy of a Xerox machine? Will it become incomprehensible once you make it small? Is there so much detail that it turns into an unattractive blob?

3. Your logo needs to be easy to remember. If a customer sees your logo, will they remember it? This is your brand, your image. Think about how the Nike swoosh is burned into your brain. Ideally, your logo will incorporate something just as unique, simple and memorable.

4. Make sure you keep your logo in a vector-based file format for future use. A jpg might work if you are putting your logo online, but it won’t print well.

One thing I do a lot of as a freelance designer who specializes in corporate and industrial business work is what I call logo repair or logo recovery. Often, a business or individual will have a copy of their logo that someone else designed for them, but not in an appropriate digital format. They will have a printout or a low resolution jpg and when they need to have print jobs done, they no longer have a clean logo in a print quality format. I go back and re-design their logo, often improving it as I go, and give it back tot hem in an appropriate vector file format. If you need a service like this, please drop me a line via my contact form. My prices are super reasonable.

I talked about several topics involved in getting your online presence up and running when you are a small business owner. I’ve gone over choosing a host, designing a logo, choosing a name for your business and ways to make sure you stay ahead of your competitors in the search engines.

So, how about taking a look at who is visiting your site, how much traffic you are generating and where that traffic is finding you? That is all as simple as making sure you have a good stats program installed on your site and then learning how to make the most of the data it gives you.

GoStats offers both free and paid professional stats for your site. Best of all, they are simple to install and even easier to interpret. I suggest at least signing up for the free stats and seeing how comfortable you are with the data presentation. You can always upgrade to a more advanced account.

The free account does give you access to information about when and where your visitors are coming. I find this to be the most useful part of my stats, because it tells me if advertising is driving traffic, if links from other businesses are successful, or if a particular search engine is returning results for me. It also tells me which days of the week are best for my target demographic and what time throughout the day those people are online and looking for the particular information my website offers.

If you know which pages on your site are most popular, you can gauge where you need to focus future efforts. If I see that a majority of my traffic is coming in to look at a particular product, I will add new products along the same lines.

If you already have stats, learn how to use them. If you don’t have them yet, sign on at GoStats and start learning more about your site’s traffic.

I love being able to recommend Florida businesses on Suncoast Scribe. I’m especially thrilled to be able to present you with a company who has their headquarters in Gainesville, Florida – which is where I used to live before I moved back here to the Tampa Bay area.

More significantly, telling you about the 352 Media Group feels like a good fit for my blog, because I have so many people who come here looking of information on starting their small crafting businesses. I get multiple e-mails each day asking me for input about starting a business website. When I find out that the business owner has no experience in web design or site promotion, I always recommend that they hire professionals to help them.

That’s where 352 Media Group comes into the picture. They are a Florida web development company with offices nationwide –Atlanta, Gainesville, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Jacksonville, FL. They specialize in custom web design, web application development, CD/DVD production, web marketing, e-commerce solutions, and more. Plus, they won 14 Addy Awards in 2006 alone.

Give them a look and see if they might be the right fit for your business needs. . Don’t forget to check out their blog. It’s amusing.

If you have a store or a restaurant or a school in a physical location I think the old adage “if you build it they will come”. When you have a website, on the other hand, you need to actually put effort into making sure your site is accessible, easy to use, and helps the user navigate the pages. Look at this custom search engine that was compiled for Collins College, for example:
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=004734434582323036421%3A182liotgk9y

Collins has set up the custom engine to use for searching their website. It’s a great example of utilizing technology that already exists on the internet to integrate usability into your site. When your site visitors feel like they have a better handle on how to find the information they are looking for, they are more apt to spend more time on your site and consider your pages their last stop in their quest for an answer.

Consider integrating a customized search on your own website.