New Project: Epic Tees

I’ve obviously been getting really into the tee culture as of late, and one thing I’ve noticed is that there is no solid, exceptionally designed  gallery to see all the tees that are out there. There are plenty of places to plop your tee to show off, but I feel none of the sites execute with the proper style an industry such as this deserves.

I think great designers deserve a great showroom, and that’s the mission behind Epic Tees. I’m still working on the design and debating what platform I develop it in. Here’s what I’ve narrowed it down to:

• Using Wordpress would be easiest for me, but it would also be the most limiting. Hacking up a pre-made theme with the proper functionality and making sure it maintains a particular level of aesthetic integrity would be hard to do—or damn near impossible.
• I could hire a programmer to do exactly what I want, but this would cost money now as well as in the future when I need an update. As I covered before, money is tight for me right now, though things seem to be turning around with the freelance work (I’ll post about it soon).
• I’m tempted to finally crack open my Beginning Ruby book and to take Epic up as my first fully-developed site. The language is supposedly the easiest to learn when stacked with Rails, and I’d like to be a little less oblivious in regards to code. Right now, it all looks like the Matrix to me once I step outside the realm of HTML and CSS.

As with my other projects, there is a business model involved. Remember, always have a business model. Epic Tees will let any designer or company add their tee for a fee of $10. This is to keep spammers out and to make it so I can tell clients to shove off when I have designs to put into Epic’s listing.

My goal is to get the site to hold 1,000 shirts and be PageRank 4 by the next Google PR update and to make the $10 worth it for the back link value alone, on top of the potential sales the site will generate for everyone. Obviously, some brands have affiliate programs and I will throw in as many shirts as I can from these companies so long as the quality isn’t laughable. If you’ve got a clothing label, give me a shout! I’ll gladly add you for free for the initial release.

Which platform do you think I should use? Is $10 too little per shirt, too much, or just right?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 02nd, 2008 and is filed under Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.