We are liquidating an overstock of custom screen printed t-shirts from Ascendant. Durrani designed all of these unique t-shirts. We have 6 cool designs available in various sizes and colors. We are selling the overstock surplus left-over.

T-Shirts are only $14 each with free shipping.

Visit our online store at TeeCompressed.com. There is a limited quantity available.

Here are a few of the t-shirt designs:

Shop now online at TeeCompressed.com.

Post 5 of our ongoing case study - Project Tee Compressed

It’s been just about 3 months, almost to the day, since our last post on Project Tee Compressed. We haven’t blogged about our progress but development has been moving full speed ahead. It’s hard to squeeze in the time to write about our progress and milestones, while at the same time actually doing the work.

We are, however, excited about the progress we’ve made with our new site at TeeCompressed.com. One of the decision points every project has is deciding when to launch. The critical question of when the design and programming is good enough to go-live. We eventually reach this point with all of our clients and many of them develop a strange hesitation, almost a “stage fright”… a failure to launch. They want to continually refine the site and tweak the design, constantly polishing the look and wordsmithing the content.

Launching a new website requires a leap of faith. At some point you have to weigh the cost of not launching the site and whether the last 5% of development and adjustments are worth the lost exposure and potentially lost sales of a delay. I’ve always been a fan of rapid prototyping (or rapid application development). Rapid development allows us to build the framework of a website quickly, paying as much attention to detail as possible, but not allowing it to slow down the process. Building a website (or any application) quickly, gives us a chance to get more done sooner and learn from any mistakes earlier in the process so that we can incorporate those lessons into the final design. Rather then waiting to make major changes after extensive development, we build quickly and make minor adjustments along the way, saving money and building a more useful and more testing final product.

The reason I bring up rapid development is because this was our process with building TeeCompressed.com. Our goal was to get the site up and running, make the search engines aware of our existence and get the clock ticking on organic rankings and exposure.

By having a under-construction page already live, we were seeing some search engine activity. We went through several more design revisions before going live but we always kept our number one goal to launch the site as soon as possible. We launched the site in first week in June. We registered a new toll free 877 phone number to route all customer service and order inquiries to a single point. In the past, we’ve written about using a service such as Ring Central (see our post on Expanding your Digital Office) and how important (and inexpensive) it is to represent your company correctly and invest in doing things right from the start. A simple toll free line can be as little as $4.99 per month.

After launching, our site had been live about 3 days and our toll free number had been live about 48 hours when we received our first phone call and request for a quote. The quote for almost $3000 in compressed t-shirts. This situation is a great example that we share with our clients, about the importance of launching the site as soon as possible and as soon as it is ready. Had we delayed our launch, we would have missed a great opportunity for getting a new customer and potential sale.

In the interest of keeping this post short, I’ll run the numbers to-date. As a prospective website entrepreneur,  you should expect to invest (over time) an appropriate amount to see things through to success.

• Total time elapsed: 25 weeks.
• Total time site has been live: 11 weeks.
• Purchased 5 domain names at about $9 each for a total of $45.
• Hosting fees at $39.95 per month x approx. 6 months.
• Toll free # at $4.99 per month.
• Total graphic design time to date: approx. 45 hours
• Total website development, search engine optimization & programming time: 75 hours.

Total cost to date:
120 hrs x standard $65 per hour rate = $7800 + $45 domains + $239 total hosting + $15 phone #

Approximate cost: $8099.00

Keep in mind that we were only working on this site part-time and very often had to stop work completely while we switched over to other client work. We’re excited about the Compressed T-shirt product and our site traffic is slowly growing but search engine optimization takes time. As the graph below shows, we are trending up. But as we say to all clients, even with a personal trainer, it takes months to get in shape. You don’t fire your trainer after 3 weeks because you don’t yet have that perfect body.

See all posts on Project Tee Compressed.

Clients often ask how to customize the little logo for their website that appears in their web browser tabs, title bars and bookmark lists. This little icon is called a “favicon” and is 16 pixels by 16 pixels. Here are some familiar examples.

Some people try and create the actual 16 x 16 graphic by hand using Photoshop, but editing at that small level of detail can be difficult and you often end up with a blurry and pixelated square.

Here’s a quick and easy shortcut to creating your own custom favicon for your website or blog. Find any square graphic that you want to use as your favicon. Ideally, this graphic is a larger, detailed graphic, around 200 pixels by 200 pixels, such as our Durrani “D” graphic that we use for our logo mark, pictured here to the right. Any image you want to use is fine and can be a .jpg, .gif or .png file type.

Then just go to http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/, browse to your graphic and click the button to generate your favicon. You can even optionally animate your graphic. The generated favicon file will be a compressed ZIP file that you can download to your computer and extract.

Transfer (FTP) the favicon.ico file that you downloaded, to the root folder of your website (the main public directory). A web browser automatically looks for the favicon.ico file when it loads your website and if found, will use it instead of the Internet Explorer or Firefox default icon. Now when someone visits or bookmarks your website, your new graphic will show up as the custom icon and will give your site a unique branding to stand out from the rest.

We used the “D” graphic above to create our site favicon. Here’s what the final image now looks like in a web browser:

One quick note – web browsers typically store or “cache” these files in a temporary folder on your computer each time you visit a website, so in order to get your new favicon file to show up, you might have to close and reopen your browser and/or clear out your browser temporary internet files. You can also try pressing the CTRL key and F5 key at the same time to force the page to load from scratch and refresh the all content and images.

That’s all there is to it. So go make your website bookmark and browser tab stand out from the rest with your new custom favicon.

AddSpacetoYourLife.com wanted to revamp their online image and came to Durrani for that new look. As an expert personal image consultant herself, the owner of AddSpacetoYourLife.com knew all too well how important perception is to new customers. It’s equally important to have experts by your side when building that online presence as well.

The AddSpacetoYourLife.com website was built using Wordpress and customized into a powerful and flexible content management system. The existing website had already been up and running for years and so it was extremely important to maintain the current organic search engine rankings while completely rebuilding the site structure and content.

Here are the before and after shots of their website, completely designed and developed by Durrani Design. At the time of this post, the website is still under development but it can be found at www.AddSpacetoYourLife.com.