Tips and Tricks for Customizing Your CafePress Premium Shop

Introduction

While technically I've been a CafePress shopkeeper since the spring of 2005, it wasn't until April of 2007 that I really caught the bug and began actively designing new products and trying to sell them. I work full time as a web developer, play in a band, and have a beautiful newborn daughter so, needless to say, I have a very limited amount of time to work on my shop. However, I've chipped away at it over several months and my main shop, Garageband Gear, is now a premium shop with 30-40 different designs and I sell more than enough to cover my premium shop fees though I'm just shy of receiving my first check.

Having spent a few months now working with the CafePress website, I have to say it's been a great experience overall. It is very easy to upload designs, place them on products, and organize/categorize my products into a cohesive store. With CafePress printing and shipping the items, fielding customer service calls, and providing the CafePress marketplace, I can't imagine ever silk screening and stocking T-shirts myself. The extra markup just isn't worth it for a part-timer like me.

Despite my overwhelmingly positive experience with CafePress, there is one area where I wish they'd make some improvements. Customizing the appearance of a premium shop can be a frustrating and time consuming process. Customizing the functionality is even more of a problem. While I understand that they need to retain a lot of control to ensure the best user experience possible, I think there are a few steps that could be taken to ease the pain of experienced developers trying to customize a shop. Luckily though, where there's a will there's a way - and if you can edit even a small portion of a web page, you can completely alter it via JavaScript and CSS.

The following customizations are things I've done to my shop. Feel free to take the HTML and use it in your own shops. Just do me one favor: If you like what you see here, and you have a friend who is a musician, you can thank me by sending them a link to http://www.cafepress.com/garagebandgear.

--Travis Hanna, June 14th, 2007

Tips

  1. Changing your colors and fonts
  2. Removing the guillemets (») from the sidebar
  3. Placing your logo in the upper left
  4. Installing and configuring Google Analytics
  5. Change the color of sub-sections in the sidebar

Unless otherwise noted, all of the code in the tips listed here has been tested and found to work in the following browsers:

Updates

My schedule will not allow me to update this page often. I expect to publish a new tip about once per month - maybe slightly less frequently, probably not more frequently. If you would like to be notified when a new tip becomes available, join my mailing list and I'll send you an e-mail when I've written a new article. I promise I won't spam you or give away your e-mail address.

Alternately, if you would rather not recieve E-mail notifications, I have set up an RSS feed at http://cafepress.travishanna.com/rss.xml. You can subscribe via your favorite RSS reader or browser.