Domain Name Tutorial

One of the 7 tips we covered in our webinar about “How to Bling Your Shop” was setting up a domain name for your shop.

Here is Justin’s easy tutorial, conveintly located in the Spreadshirt Forums, about setting up a domain name for your shop.  I know this may be a little basic for you experience shop partners, but I know this info is very helpful for anyone just getting started.

How to get your own Domain for your Spreadshop

A lot of new shop owners want to know how the more established shops are using their own domains, like mine at BlueFishTShirts.com instead of bluefishtshirts.spreadshirt.com.

First thing you need to do is buy your own domain.  Godaddy.com is a very popular and inexpensive place to buy one.  I actually use Hostway.com to purchase all my domains for $6.95 each, they are a huge company and have been around forever.  For $6.95 you can purchase yourwebsitename.com and own it for a whole year.  When the year is up you can register it again.  Most domain sellers will give you the option to also purchase many years in advance.

Once you own your own domain you have two choices on how to use it with your shop.

Option 1 - Forward your domain to your Spreadshirt shop.

You can forward your domain to your spreadshirt shop.  This means that when you go to yourdomainname.com it will automatically bring you straight to yourshop.spreadshirt.com.  This way is the easiest way for people to get their own domain, but that dont want to or know how to build a whole website around it.

An example of a forwarded domain:
Go to www.designyourowntees.com
It will immediatly forward you to http://www.spreadshirt.com/shop.php?sid=10077 which is my Designer shop.

Sometimes when I want to direct people straight to my designer its easier to tell them to go to DesignYourOwnTees.com than to give them the spreadshirt address.

When you go to purchase your domain make sure the site you are buying from lists “Domain Forwarding” as one of the features.  Then login to your account on that site and look for the domain forwarding option.  You should be able to type in the address that you want it to forward to, which would be the address of your shop.

Option 2 - Build your own website

You can build your own website which interacts with your spreadshirt shop.  This is how my main site, BlueFishTShirts.com is set up.  When you go to www.bluefishtshirts.com you are brought to a website that I created and that I host on my own servers.  There are a ton of tutorials online on how to create your own website, and there a billion companies that will host your website for you.  I use Fweem.com, they start out at $5 a month to host your website.

My site is very simple.  I chose to make it simple on purpose.  I hit the customer with images of all of my shirts right away and all they have to do is click on them to see more info or to buy them.  The way I integrated it with my spreadshirt shop is very simple.  The graphics on my site simply link to the shop.  So when you click on the first little square image of the shirt “I’m Not With Stupid Anymore” it links directly to that shirt within my spreadshirt shop.  Which is located at http://www.spreadshirt.com/shop.php?sid … id=1267014

I then designed my Spreadshirt shop to look exactly like my website, so that when the customer is taken to the shop they don’t feel like they have left and gone to another website.  You do this by editing the headers and footers within your Spreadshop admin.

Another great example of this process is Tommy’s site at NekkidTees.com.  His site, in my opinion, is flawlesly integrated with his shop.  Its a brilliant layout, but its so completely simple when you get down to it.

And to answer the next most frequented question - No, you do not have to be a Premium Member to use either of these methods.  All of this is stuff that we do seperate from Spreadshirt and you can do it with your free shop as well.

Option 2 can be tricky if you don’t know how to make websites.  But you don’t necessarily need to be a graphic artist or know html.  There are a ton of great websites out there that will let you make your own website fairly easily.  Googlepages.com is a new Google service that lets you create your own websites very easily, and they will even host it for you for free.