Hello again,
The good thing about DecoNetwork is that you can change your website anytime you want – quickly and easily. With the new version 2, there are more new cool design templates to choose from. I have changed my logo and site look and feel – hope you like it.
For a Fulfillment Center, you will need to set up and define the printable regions for your products. The DecoNetwork Help site is a great resource on how to set up your Fulfillment Store. From an affiliate store perspective, the products have been added and set up by our Fulfillment Center, so we just need to focus on creating and adding our designs to the store.
This is the stage where we would need to invest most of our time and effort to. After all we want our site to have a combination of already “created products” to sell and “store designs” for our customers to use for their creations.
As a newbie, I’ve discovered a few things along the way – that will ensure the whole process will be a lot quicker and easier going forward. The secret is to practice and do a few test designs first to get the feel for it, before you start uploading all of your designs – incase you discover it isn’t what you want (this has happened to me a number of times – now that’s the time consuming part).
Here are some tips:
- Work out your design categories – just to have an idea what you will be designing and how it is going to be structured on your site (doesn’t have to be a complete final list, you can change later if needed).
- Use Firefox as the chosen browser – found it quicker than Internet Explorer.
- Choose and copy a good small selection of “stock designs” to your site for your own use and for your customers’ use – choose the designs that are most likely to be used as this will appear in your “store designs” library and on your homepage for customers to choose from – the “stock design” library is still accessible for your customer usage too.
- Focus on the easy and quick design first – build the momentum and experience. You can work on the more elaborate designs later.
- Try to save your individual elements/motifs separately – so you can add them to your “store design” library (provide customers more choice) – customers can reuse different elements for different products/items, plus you can use them too when composing your designs, as they can be overlapped (providing you save the file with a transparent background).
- For graphics or vector artwork, best to save them as a .png or .eps file – for background transparency. So the designs will look good against any coloured background.
- Saving files, ensure they are in the following format:
- .eps
- .png
- .jpg
- .gif
- .emb (for embroidery designs – only available for Fulfillment Centers only)
- If you are stuck with some design ideas, try creating some designs using DecoNetwork “stock designs” just to get you site up and running, so there are some items for sale while you think, plan and work on the more unique designs for your site.
- Refer to online graphics and design resources for inspiration like Smashing Magazine, CG Textures (free texture site), Colourlovers (colour & pattern ideas), Color Schemer (work out color palette), Absolute Cross (good Photoshop tutorials and textures), CreativePro, Design Meltdown 2010 and fotolia (stock images – more affordable than istockphoto).
- Consider using different brushes and effects to give your design a new dimension. Have you downloaded the 50 Must-Have Photoshop Brushes?
Now that there are some development and some designs on our site, I am really excited about creating more designs for the store. My next task is to design some patterns for the fabrics and wall decals and include more fancy designs for the t-shirts.
If you have any other tips on creating designs for your site or have any recommendation on design resources, please do share with us…
I hope you find the above tips useful.
Happy designing!
Anh
