I own and operate Screen Designs Printing & Embroidery in Bethel, Connecticut, and about 8 years ago I started getting a lot of customers in my store with printouts of t-shirts that they had designed on their home computers using sites like Vistaprint or CustomInk. I knew immediately that if customers had the ability to design pretty cool shirts on their own, it was going to be a game changer in the industry. People were picking products, selecting their favorite colors, uploading logos and creating a customized shirt in minutes, all from the comfort from their own home. It was a new way of doing business.

Up until that point, getprintedshirts.com only had a basic brochure style/informational website. I wanted to emulate the functionality of these other sites and allow my customers to shop from home. I envisioned an easy-to-use process that would walk site visitors through a step-by-step process of picking a shirt, style, color and then having their customized product appear before their eyes. I know a lot about t shirts, but, at the time, I knew very little about web development. So I set out on a journey to help my vision come to fruition.

Through my research, the phrase content management system kept rising to the surface, and I started looking into Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla. I read a lot about each CMS, but ultimately decided on Joomla because the vast amount of training material available online. I visited the Joomla Forum and watched several videos on YouTube about how Joomla could be used to build a customized online business presence. I liked how easily I could launch a demo site through CloudAccess.net and I also found their Joomla Webinars very helpful. After attending a webinar I had my own website up and running in just about an hour. I was very excited about what I was doing because Joomla was much more powerful than what I had used to create websites in the past.

I learned as much about Joomla as I could, signed up for training at Lynda.com, and watched and read everything I could find online. I started to piece together the functionality of the site from product marketing to business services, photo galleries, lead generation, blogging and social media integration. Not being a developer, coder or designer, I found CloudAccess.net’s Insane Support™ no joke. Believe me, these are friendly, down to earth people, that don’t talk over our non-techie heads, but also know Joomla at it’s core.

I was doing a lot on my own, night after night, and working with the CloudAccess.net support team on a continual basis. I was submitting tickets, using live chat and calling them directly. I became known as the ambitious “t-shirt guy” and I was on a first name basis most of the support team. I got real familiar with CloudAccess.net on Facebook and saw that they were designing their own CloudAccess.net t-shirts. I decided to reach out to see if they were interested in an exchange of services: I was willing to offer 25 years of t-shirt designing and printing experience in exchange for some help from their talented Professional Services team to really nail down my site.

I contacted CloudAccess.net CEO Gary Brooks, and we drew up an exchange of services. I agreed to design and print up a bunch of t-shirts that CloudAccess.net could keep or give to their customers at conferences, and I got more than what I expected from their project management. I was blown away because I was just plugging away every night by myself, going through the trial and error process, and then I had an entire professional web development team.

I first met with Jonathan Gafill, the project manager, and we went over everything I envisioned as far as functionality. He assessed the scope of the project and suggested we use SobiPro, a powerful directory component, because a front end developer could customize it to make it easy for me to upload and enter new products in the future. Iwona Wilkowiecka, wrote a custom script that enabled site visitors to select a specific product and click on a color swatch to change the actual shirt color. This was an awesome feature I had only seen on the big international, well-known t-shirt sites.

Once the shirt style and color are selected, their product is loaded into our apparel design studio software where visitors can literally can create their own custom t-shirt design online. They can upload their company logo or create one from scratch, add text, select a cool font, apply text effects and even add an image from our online clip art gallery. I wanted to make the process as easy as possible and I was able to accomplish that with the help of CloudAccess.net. I also wanted to add a blogging feature and social sharing options to my site so I went with EasyBlog from StackIdeas. I had my blog up and running in about 30 minutes. One of the best features of EasyBlog is that it’s simple to share your blogs across multiple social channels with a click of a button.

I love feedback, so feel free to add comments so I can improve your user experience. There are a few images below of the process of printing CloudAccess.net gear.

                                        

If you are new to Joomla like I was just 2 years ago and if you’re feeling a little overwhelemed with the new terminology and jargon, have patience and use the CloudAccess.net training resources. You can learn at your own pace, take it one step at a time, and if you have any questions you can reach out to the CloudAccess.net support team or the expansive Joomla community for help. The community is a very popular resource and every single Joomla user, even the people who are experts, had to start somewhere.

I can't stress enough how wonderful the CloudAccess.net has been thoughout my project, but I can say the same for all the fellow Joomla users I have met and will continue to meet along my journey.

Again thanks for everything!