A couple of years ago, when I put together my Retropolis web site, I had no idea that there would be a problem there for users who were using touch sensitive mobile devices. Since I figured that out it has bothered me whenever I’ve had a moment to be bothered.

The problem is that my spiffy dropdown menus scroll down when you pass your mouse over them. This is a really neat thing, for desktops and laptops, while it’s a disaster on those devices that don’t understand the concept of a hovering pointer. Which is every touch device, I’m afraid.

The sorry truth is that I’m sure the main navigation at Retropolis just hasn’t worked for folks who came there with their iPad, their Android or Blackberry smartphone, or one of the countless numbers of other mobile devices.

I may have fixed that today; I can’t be certain (because I’ve got no actual mobile devices to test with*) but it seems sound.

I adopted the logic from a clever Python script. The deal is, you don’t want to have to selectively identify every mobile device in the universe. There are too many; there are more every day; and any bit of Javascript that tries to keep up to date will be as big as a phone book before you know it.

On the other hand, there are very few desktop operating systems. If you check for each of those, almost anything that’s left is a phone or tablet. There are some exceptions – the iPhone and iPad actually include the word "Mac OS" in their user agent strings (curse you, iDevices!) so you need to do a little additional screening to weed that out, as shown in the post above. But on the whole the logic works, so I made up my own little version in Javascript.

At the moment those menus should behave properly whether you’re on a desktop/laptop, or on a mobile device. But like I said I can’t do a lot of testing since at the moment I’m limited to Windows, plus a little user agent spoofing.

So if you’re using an iPad or an Android tablet, some other tablet, or a smartphone (or even an unusual operating system) you could test that for me by visiting Retropolis and trying to use the dropdown menu below the header on each page.

If you’re using a desktop computer the menus should drop down when you pass your mouse over them. If you’re using a mobile device, you should be able to bring the menu down by clicking on it. That’s all there is to it (I hope!)

You can enter your results in the comments here if you like; I’d like to know what device you used, what browser you used, and how the menus behaved.

What I hate in Safari – when I’m pretending to be an iPad – is that the menus pop down lower than on a desktop. But that’s a lot better than having them fail entirely, isn’t it?

*although I do have a fantastic 1947 Stromberg-Carlson telephone; so, you know, eat your heart out.

Technorati Tags: web development, mobile devices, touch, mouseover, hover, web design, retropolis

Though I always liked that part, myself.

So you, too, adventurer, can now harness the awesome power that is the Mug-O-Matic: it randomly generates the titles of pulp science fiction stories that don’t exist, but often ought to*, and then it slaps your favorite titles onto coffee mugs, travel mugs, and mugs of other mysterious and malevolent kinds that it were not well to mention here.

Okay, not really: I just got tired of listing them. Fun little toy, though!

*every now and then it manages to re-create a title that does, in fact., exist. Which is even stranger than the thing with the squirrels.

Technorati Tags: thrilling tales of the downright unusual, mug-o-matic, title-o-tron, random sci fi title generator, humor, coffee mugs

It was created with a system called Choicescript. Choicescript games are free to play on the web, but are also available as iPhone and Android apps. There’s (so far) one more game called Choice of Broadsides.

In a lot of ways these resemble what I’ve done with Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual – in fact the basic differences are owed to the two facts that I’m simultaneously developing for the web and for print, and I’m illustrating my story nodes. As it stands the Choicescript games don’t support illustrations but it wouldn’t take much custom Javascript (and/or php) in the page template to fix that. Choicescript allows you to set variables depending on the player’s actions and one of those variables could easily be the URL of an illustration. A little document.write, and you’re there.

If you’re interested in playing with Choicescript – some user-created games get hosted on the choiceofgames site – you can start out with the blog.

Technorati Tags: text adventure, game engine, choice of games, choice of the dragon, choice of broadsides, roll your own

You’re back? Okay then.

In order to get the basic function of the site working, I used three different solutions from three different sources. I’ll be writing about each of them in detail as we go. For today, let’s start with an overview of those three solutions.

They are CPShop, for Cafepress content; the Zazzle Store Builder (ZSB) for Zazzle content; and myPFStore, for Printfection content. Here’s a basic description of their features.

I’ll have more to say about each of these when I continue these articles with a description of what I did – and in some cases, how I did it – as I incorporated each of them into a single site.

There were some challenges. If you remember, I wanted each part of the site to be uniform even though the incoming content would vary, and it was also important that in both large ways and small ones the new pages would look unique to the search engines.

But that’s another story- or, in fact, three of them.

Technorati Tags: print on demand, custom web site, off site, printfection, zazzle, cafepress, ecommerce, pod, customization

The design of a web site is always about several things, and only one of those things is "making it pretty". In fact the way you make it pretty all depends on the decisions you’ve made about what the purpose of the site will be (often not as obvious as you might think), what the content will be, how the user will find that content, and how the user will understand where he or she is within the site – and then be able to get elsewhere with as few clicks as you can manage.

The answers to those questions determine the framework within which you will make the site pretty. That’s because these answers tell you what you’re designing. If you leap off to figure out what it’s going to look like without answering those questions first you’re going to end up with something that (presumably) looks great, but whether it does the job it needs to do is left completely to chance.

So although I didn’t start by making a list that I can handily reprint here (bad, bad me!), these are the answers to those questions for my Retropolis site.

1. The purpose of the site is to create one central location in which shoppers can find all (or nearly all) of the Retropolis merchandise I sell through several Print on Demand, or POD, venues elsewhere on the web. The main components are T-Shirts (and other merchandise) from my Retropolis Transit Authority store (through Printfection); posters, blank books, and other merchandise from my Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design store (through Cafepress, although the primary storefront is already at my own domain); customizable business cards and greeting cards, coffee mugs, and other merchandise from my Retropolis Travel Bureau store (through Zazzle); and other odds and ends, including the archival art prints I offer through Deviant Art and other yet-to-be- disclosed products that I’m not talking about yet. Although some of the existing stores may sell the same type of merchandise (coffee mugs, for example), I will pick just one POD for a product type here. That’s mainly to avoid confusion, but it also depends on how well the products are presented.

2. The content of the site is mostly determined by the above, but there are some other considerations. First off there needs to be a certain amount of supporting content that explains what the site is, what the art is, and where it comes from. Secondly, the presentation of the site’s products needs to include a lot of unique, new content to convince the search engines that these pages are not carbon copies of the original store pages; thirdly, wherever possible minor changes to the incoming POD content should be made, for the same reason. (More on this below).

3. The site is built from content that comes from several sources, and the products are sold through more than one shopping cart. The user will navigate through all of this using a single, consistent, unifying system. Inasmuch as it’s possible the pages within a given POD’s content will look like the pages from any of the other PODs, so that the site feels like a single place rather than a hodgepodge of stuff that’s loosely tied together.

4. The final question – "How the user will understand where he or she is within the site" – is central to this project. Everything in #3 above is true: but in addition, while the site feels like a single place the user must also understand at all times that there are (at least) three shopping carts; that only one of those carts can be used to purchase the products on the current page; and which cart that is.

You often find in the design of a thing that there’s a contradiction between two or more of the goals of the object. So part of the process of design is to find compromises between those conflicting goals.

Sometimes these conflicting goals are as simple as "The device needs to be ready Thursday!" and "The device needs to work!". (A pretty challenging example, when you think about it). In this project we’ve got a dynamic tension between #3 and #4.

That tension – the compromises between those conflicting goals – is the basic framework that everything else, technical or visual, needs to address.

The second most important consideration is how the search engines view the site. I touched on this above.

The reality is that for the most part this means: how will Google view the site? Will it decide that the site is nothing but duplicate content? And since some of the links to merchandise are affiliate links (the Zazzle product links, for example, have a referrer code attached), will Google see this as nothing but a writhing nest of affiliate links, and disregard it?

Both of those issues are about duplicate content.

It’s not that Google hates affiliate links; but when it finds them, it seems to hold the whole page (and maybe the whole site) to a higher standard. When Googlebot sees your affiliate links it sort of raises one eyebrow and says "Oh yeah?"

Why? Well, in some places on the web you’ll find products offered for sale where all of the information about the product is taken from someplace else. The framing site may be different, but the product information is identical. This is almost always an affiliate marketing site – since who else would do that? Google sees this as an uncreative attempt to sell the same stuff, in the same way, that it’s sold elsewhere… just an effort to siphon off some of the sales revenue. From Google’s standpoint the web site owner has added nothing valuable for the customer. So the pages that Google considers the "original" product pages will be ranked much more highly than these new pages, which may even be ignored.

Yet in other parts of the web you’ll find the same books offered for sale through web sites like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders. Google understands that these are completely different stores that sometimes sell the same merchandise.

You want Google to see your site as the second type – not the first.

So the final design consideration for my multi-POD web site is that wherever possible I would not only add new content, but make subtle changes to the incoming content from the POD. This is a technical issue, not a visual one, but it also involves some new visual design.

Is this some kind of a way to trick Google? I’m pretty sure it depends on who you ask. Obviously I’d say "No". Even if I made no effort to present these products differently I’d still be adding value for the user by presenting all of these scattered – but related – things in one place. But experience shows us that Google might feel differently about that.

And the fact is, by addressing those concerns I’ll end up with a better web site, with new, unique content that’s related to these products. Google hopefully gets what it likes to see, users get something more interesting, and I get… well, I get a site that does what it’s intended to do.

Everybody wins! But… somehow, I’m the only one who has to work at it. Oh well.

I won’t return to this issue in much detail until I’m writing about the ways I drew in and modified the product content for each POD. But it’s an essential part of how the site is built and it affects the visual design, too, as we’ll see.

Because what we’re going to look at now is the ways I tried to meet all of these goals in the site’s visual design. Remember what these goals are?

1. To draw in related products from my many POD ventures across the web.

2. To create a unified appearance and navigation for the site despite the fact that the content is coming in from several places, and in several ways.

3. And although it all looks unified, it must always be clear to the user that the products within one section of the site use one shopping cart and checkout, while other sections of the site use their own shopping cart and checkout.

So let’s have a look at what I did.

Figure 1: Overall page layout (links to original)

Figure 1 Notes:

1. The header bar for the site. There are links to the home page, a "Shopping Carts" link, an "About Retropolis" link, and a "Help" link. These are the basic navigation links that a user may want at any time - unlike #8, the footer – and have two features ("Shopping Carts" and "Help") that immediately explain how orders are processed and shipped in different ways. Those two links are important, but they need to display only a small amount of information to the user – immediately. For those reasons I use modal DHTML "pop-ups" here. They’re not what you think of as a pop up window – one that opens in a new browser. They’re small(ish), informative panels that come up "above" the page content without leaving the page. Once they’re dismissed, you’re left exactly where you were, on the same page where you started.

2. The site’s main navigation bar. This isn’t in the sidebar – we’d have a long, wandering sidebar if I’d gone that way, and I had other plans for the sidebar content. This is a four-part horizontal drop-down menu. By handling the site’s navigation this way I’m able to create a visual cue – echoed on the home page, where the top of the page is divided into matching columns – which reinforces the idea that we have separate, related sections in the site. This also gave me the canvas on which I’d use another visual cue, which we see in #3. Finally, the last item in the three main dropdown menus is a link to visit the shop these products have come from. I don’t much care if they do; I’m perfectly happy if users stay right here. But it’s another way to communicate the idea that these products are coming from several distinct places.

3. The "You Are Here" graphic hovers over whichever section of the site you’re in. This is another visual cue that I hope will prevent confusion if, for example, you’ve added t-shirts to your cart (under Tab #1) and don’t see those t-shirts in the cart when you’re under another tab.

4. The Breadcrumb and page links bars throughout the site look as nearly identical as possible. The Breadcrumb always links back to this site’s home page rather than to a separate "home page" for, say, the Retropolis Transit Authority. This presented some problems with the Printfection content, but we’ll see why when we get there. Even when the content of the page links bar changes from a pretty standard layout of 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 to something else, it’s still shown in the same colored and bordered rectangle no matter what sort of page you’re on.

5. The "View Cart" buttons at the top and bottom of the sidebar identify the source of the cart (here, "from the Retropolis Transit Authority") to further show the user that this is a cart for these products, not for every product on the site. This is getting repetitive, I know, but as I explained above this single point is the most important thing the user interface needs to make clear. That’s what these many visual cues are trying to do.

6. The sidebars throughout the site are used to add relevant, unique content to the pages. In some cases this is information the user needs, about the products on that page. in other cases the sidebar is just adding some funny bits and bobs that relate to the products. Apart from being entertaining, this is all part of the plan to add unique content to the site pages that will differentiate them from my original shops’ pages. Where practical this content is different when you’re on a main section, a subsection, or a product page. That became a technical hurdle at times – and I can still do more of it – but I came to see this as a basic tenet for the pages: to distinguish them from the pages in the "parent" sites, and also to distinguish them from one another.

7. Page link bars repeat at the bottom of the pages. That probably seems pretty basic but often they’re not included. In fact, giving the user someplace of your own to go when they’re done with a page’s content is always very important, and it’s an area where I think this site design could be made stronger. I’ve been resisting a repeat of the horizontal nav bar down here even though I think it could be of practical value – I just don’t like the way it would look. Also: directly beneath each POD’s content there’s a fine print disclaimer explaining that items in this POD’s shopping cart can’t be combined with items from another’s.

8. The footer repeats the links we saw in the header, but adds some: "Contact", "Blog", and "Links". these are places the user may want to go, but they don’t directly help me to shake all the loose change out of the user’s pockets. So here, at the bottom of the page, they’re available to those who made it this far without looking at more products or – better yet! – buying something.

These features are common to every page on the site, which sounds obvious, but isn’t always as simple as you’d expect. The fact that the product content is being delivered in three different ways – four, when we include some static pages – made the Breadcrumb and page links areas difficult to manage. But remember: we’re trying to make everything consistent while still showing that there are important differences.

The example in Figure 1 is a "Main Section" or "Department" page. Some main sections have subsections, and those are essentially the same; for the most part the changes we see are in the content of the sidebars as described above in #6,

Product pages, on the other hand, are bound to vary between one POD and another. In fact because of the way Zazzle product pages work, my pages have to link to the product page at the Zazzle site – a big, continuing irritation for me. That’s the one area where my site’s inclusive design falls apart, and it’s simply because of the way the tools work. There are ways to work around this, and I may be exploring them, but that should wait till we’re looking at the Zazzle Store Builder.

In all other cases we continue with the same principles we’ve used so far. Product pages will vary, where possible, from the original POD product pages; they will use sidebar content that’s different from the sidebar content of their parent sections; in some cases, they will use sidebar content that is also unique to a single product.

Figure 2: A Product Page (links to original)

Figure 2 Notes:

1. Product page sidebars continue the convention of using that section’s shopping cart in links at the top and bottom of the sidebar. Otherwise, product sidebars feature content that’s at least slightly different from their parent sections (and sometimes from one another). This may be information about that type of product (as shown) or something completely different. Getting that particular content to appear when you want it was one of the technical challenges I faced here. But it’s worth the trouble.

2. The generic product information areas will be changed, where possible, from the version that comes in from the original POD. This works against a verdict of "duplicate content" for the site. Methods for making these changes differ a bit from POD to POD. More on that later.

So what we’ve seen so far is what I felt were the goals for, and the constraints on, the site’s design – and how I tried to solve the warring goals I was dealing with. I decided on a series of visual cues to help the user understand what was going on in the pages; I provided some informative links that spelled it out in simple language; and I mapped out the ways in which I wanted the site’s navigation to work across sections, and within the sections.

This seems so obvious that I’m in my third draft before I’m adding it – but this is just one solution. I’m not claiming that it’s the only one (it isn’t) or that it’s the best one (no idea!). It’s the best visual solution I came up with this time, facing these problems. The thing you should take away from this is that these are the problems that a site like this needs to solve.

Assuming that I achieved all of those goals, the remaining challenges – as I began to bring in and present the products – would center on keeping visual consistency and satisfying Google’s hunger for the unique, relevant content that would differentiate these pages from the original store pages I’d created at the different print-on-demand companies.

In future posts we’ll look at how I did that, one POD at a time.

Technorati Tags: print on demand, printfection, zazzle, cafepress, offsite, domain, portal, multi pod web site, web site design, several PODs on a web site, ecommerce

Then, to all appearances, I vanished.
Here’s why:

In the annual ramp up to the holiday season – that happy, carefree and yet spiritual time when I turn you upside down and try to shake all the change out of your pockets – I took on a big project that’s been on my mind for the last couple of years.

There are a whole bunch of places on the web where I sell my work, as posters and prints, on the ever-popular t-shirts of the Retropolis Transit Authority and – new, this year – on customizable business cards and other nifty swag at the Retropolis Travel Bureau. The trouble is that although I do cross-link between them, where I’m able, there was no central clearing house for all these different things. A visitor to one would usually not realize that the others existed.

So I’ve just completed that very clearing house: an "Art of Retropolis" site where I combine the products I sell through different vendors so that they’re all available in one spot.

In order to do that I had to combine three different scripts to draw in the products, along with quite a few static pages, in such a way that (I hope) it’s not confusing to the user, and moreover – when the all powerful Googlebot sees it – the site does not look as though someone’s simply scraped existing content from my original online shops. Which is pretty much a death sentence where SEO’s concerned. These two issues were such important and interesting problems that I may write up the project later on.

But for now, IT’S ALIVE!!!!!

If it works as well as I hope it will, I’ll probably do the same thing with my scattered Celtic art shops. Sometime next year.

And Thrilling Tales? I was already aware that creating the illustrations for its first story was taking longer than I’d expected. So its launch – which I’d hoped would happen right about now, or soon after – will be taking place early next year.

Technorati Tags: retropolis, retro future, uchronic, tee shirts, t shirts, posters, business cards, gifts, science fiction, sci fi, retro futuristic, raygun gothic

Two weeks ago I started to set up my first gallery/store at Zazzle; when the powers that be there saw what I was putting on the gallery’s front page they ushered me into the closed beta of their new Store Customization system. I set up a second gallery there this week, and the other night they opened up the beta so everyone could play.

This turned out to be perfect timing for me. I’d had a chance to experiment with a system that was almost ready for release (this means there was documentation!) and which as a result was pretty solid. I’d gone through about a week and a half of trying to figure out how to do the things that just about anyone would want to do and it was all fresh in my mind.

So I wrote up three tutorials at the Zazzle forum, which I’ve retooled a bit and reformatted to post here.

1. Skinning the Zazzle Sidebar

This is a step-by-step tutorial with sample graphics. It shows you how to use three small images, some CSS, and some HTML to change the appearance of your Zazzle sidebar.

2. How to Reorganize Your Zazzle Sidebar

This shows you how Zazzle’s modular elements fit together to build a store’s sidebar, and how you can move those elements around till you like ‘em.

3. How to Add a New, Custom Page to Your Zazzle Store

Here’s another step-by-step tutorial that helps you to create an entirely new page, which comes up in the sidebar like any of the standard pages and can contain your own custom content. It’s much easier to do than to explain!

Technorati Tags: zazzle, print on demand, store customization, gallery customization, skinning, custom pages, navigation panel

Over the years, that site’s been laid out to work in a browser window that’s 640 pixels wide (2002), 800 pixels wide (2005), and now 1024 pixels wide (2009). It’s always looked good, but each time it’s looked good, well, better.

I can’t let the width grow until I’m inconveniencing a very small percentage of the site’s visitors. Which is, well, now. I watch the stats on my visitors and I can see that very, very few of them are now running their displays at less than 1024 x 768.

Truth to tell, I’m still tinkering with the new version a bit. But that’s normal.

See what you think!

Technorati Tags: celtic art and retro-futuristic design, celtic design, retro science fiction, retro sci fi, dieselpunk, atompunk, retropolis, retro future

I was pleased with the way “Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design” was working out for me – if you missed it, that was my first commercial shop on the web, where I sell two kinds of art that I love making – and it was natural enough to think about what else I might do. That turned out to be the Retrovert.

At the Retrovert I sell T-Shirts, coffee mugs, greeting cards and posters with art that I’ve restored from vintage graphics sources – like WPA posters, old magazine covers, crate labels, sheet music, and promotional art for the 1939 New York Worlds Fair, a particular favorite of mine.

Because these are based on period originals they’ve taken a fair bit of retouching – a lot of retouching, in some cases. But since I picked things that I liked (and had often collected) myself, I didn’t mind so much. It was very satisfying to make these great old things new again. I really like old things, as you may have guessed, which is lucky for me since I’m on my way to being an old thing myself.

So the meat and potatoes of the Retrovert is restored vintage graphics. But I’ve done some other things there that I also like. For one thing, I’d shot a set of photographs of some wonderful old carousel animals, and those photographs found their way there; and I’ve also remixed and adapted some period sources in “Special Collections” like the Non-Conformists Union and my campaign to re-elect FDR.

The Non-Conformists Union (Local 404) is an organization I invented because it wanted to exist. I supplied it with a detailed history and supported that history with old family photographs of my great-grandparents, who were vaudeville performers and traveled all over the world. The merchandise at the NCU site claims to be reproductions of the Union’s promotional art from the 1920s and 1930s – with cheerful, misguided slogans like “Let’s All Go on the Road Less Traveled” or “Organize Against Conformity!” I’m well aware that I may have had a little too much fun, there.

And it’s a funny sort of site because although it’s a joke, it never admits it. The NCU takes itself perfectly seriously. I’m often left wondering what its visitors make of it, especially since I’ve gotten a couple of requests for information about membership in local chapters. I really can’t tell if these people are just as deadpan as I am, or if they think a.) The Non-Conformists Union is a real organization; and b.) that it makes any kind of sense at all.

My other great hoax section at the Retrovert is my campaign to re-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I’m reasonably sure that no one has taken that one seriously. Despite the (if I say it myself) attractive and persuasive campaign merchandise, FDR failed in the 2004 election. Heck, I even issued press releases. Here’s hoping he sees a groundswell of popular support in 2008!

Technorati Tags: retrovert, retro, vintage graphics, wpa, worlds fair, fdr, franklin delano roosevelt, election, non conformists union

But in 2002, when I did notice how much traffic I was getting, I started to wonder if any of those visitors would like to own a piece of my work.

Now in those days I was a pixel-pushing laborer in the Computer Game Mines. Okay, nominally I was a manager, but you get the idea. The game business is notorious for requiring long hours from its serfs and for that reason I wasn’t doing as much of my own work as I’d have liked; but I was doing some, and I was especially interested in large, ambitious pieces in resolutions that were suitable for print – and at the heart of that, what I really wanted to do was to offer archival quality prints for sale.

That’s because, when it comes down to it, digital artwork doesn’t exist – it’s just a ghost on your monitor. Unlike a traditional painting, there is no object when you’re done making it. And twenty or thirty years from now, the odds are that no one will even be able to read your digital file – so it’ll end up just as the ghost of a ghost, I guess. And while I don’t fool myself that this will matter much to anyone else, it does matter to me. I’d like to think that some of my work, which is already more interesting than I am, will last longer than I do. And since my work is entirely digital these days the only way I can encourage that to happen is to see that there are high quality prints of the work out there in the world. Hence, selling archival prints of my poster-resolution work was a big deal to me.

Now, Celtic design had been one of my favorite styles to work in since the early 80′s – so much so that I had deliberately stopped doing it for awhile, because people thought of me only as the Celtic art guy. And on the other hand, more and more I’d been exploring what I call “The Future That Never Was“, the sort of retro-future vision that flourished in the 20′s, 30′s, and 40′s. So when I looked at my body of work, what I saw was schizophrenic – part Celtic and Celtic Revival, part Buck Rogers (no, the real one) and Flash Gordon. It was, to be kind, an eclectic mix that might not make sense to other people.

As I looked around at what I might be able to do on the web to serve my two purposes (turning my site’s visitors into customers, and selling archival prints of my work), I took what turned out to be a second look at Cafepress, the successful print-on-demand site. They’ve got a pretty interesting business model – not any longer unique to them – and in 2002 they were still a relatively new service that mainly printed T-Shirts and coffee mugs. This hadn’t excited me – but they then added posters to their line-up.

And that, though it still wasn’t archival, was close enough to what I wanted that I sat up and took notice.

So I started a Cafepress store where I designed and sold posters, T-Shirts, coffee mugs, and other items decorated with my work. In the beginning, since it was the poster work I was most interested in, most everything else derived from that. My shop was hosted on the Cafepress server, but I was able to customize it to some degree, and it started to look like a place of my own.

I started placing links to the shop in my personal site, especially in those very popular clip art pages that had started the ball rolling; I looked for more quality inbound links, and in fact tried just about anything to get traffic to the shop (even fliers at local bookstores, coffee houses, and bars – I was living in Los Angeles, and there were plenty of them).

Within a few months I saw that in order to do better in my search engine traffic, I really needed to have more control over my pages, and host them myself on my own domain, instead of at the Cafepress site. So I purchased an excellent CGI program called CPShop, which allowed me to do those things. I tried it out on my second Cafepress venture, the Retrovert, and saw that it was working very well for me. So I used it on the Celtic/Retro shop as well. And that’s when Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design really began to come into its own.

I’ve redesigned the shop several times over the past years. I’ve added loads of new products and designs, and over time I’ve learned to design products based on their nature, rather than trying to repurpose my poster images for use on merchandise. Eventually, through my Deviant Art account, I’ve even been able to sell the archival prints that I wanted to offer in the first place.

And it’s also fun. I’ve had visits from people I admire, like Michael Willam Kaluta and Dean Motter; I’ve sold fifteen “There’s an Art to Rocket Science” mugs to someone at NASA who apparently drinks even more coffee than I do; I’ve been contacted by people I never knew existed, but find I’m glad that they do, like Jeff Brewer of Cool Rockets; and, you know, I’ve made some money – because it turns out that people do like my work, once they find it.

So while Long Playing Computer Graphics was my first site, and taught me loads about design and search engine optimization, Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design was the first site in which I learned how to offer my own merchandise and make some money from my art by making it available to the public, on my own, through the use of a fulfillment service. I’ve done more since then, but it’s still my most popular and successful venture – as weird a combination of art as it may be.

“It sounds like an anchovy and jelly sandwich, doesn’t it?”

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