War Is Peace

What type of shirt is that? Orwellian in fact.

This t-shirt resonates the feeling that has been sweeping through America for several years now. If we are to prevail against these corporate war machines that are sending our boys off to war to fight for what amounts to an unsubstantiated rumor, we have to come to the realization that those who try to oppress us through wartime rally cries truly believe that war = peace.

Whew...hehe. I actually had to stop myself from laughing when writing that. LOL. Those that "know" me, know that I am the FURTHEST thing from a political person. Heck, I'm not even sure what that last paragraph actually means :) Calling me political would be like calling a zebra a lasagna. It just doesn't make sense.

Although a funny political t-shirt might tickle my fancy.

I've been of voting age for years now, but I've never really been able to put my finger on what it is that makes me so ambivalent about politics in general. I mean, of course, there are certain topics and issues that I really believe in. But when it comes to presidential elections, democrats, republicans, liberatarians, whigs, etc, proposition 204s, actor/governors, my eyes just glaze over like so many donuts at the 10pm sugarwash at Krispy Kreme.

I think I take too much of an academic viewpoint on it all. Sometimes I prefer to learn about the different points of view, rather than take a particular "side". Talk radio comes in handy there. You can hear the Mike Savages and the Al Frankens of the world rant about how bad the other side is, and maybe even glean a little interesting tidbits that you might not have known about how the US is run. It's a bit of work sifting through the sands of their rants to find the pearls of wisdom that are sometimes hidden there.

Maybe that's it. I could just be too lazy to get motivated to act on such large issues. The volunteer work I do, I prefer to do locally, so I can see the impact. So I'm guessing that I'm not BanT-Shirts.com target market.

But hey, isn't it their job to lay it on the masses, to get them off their asses, to fight against these facists.

Rather than discuss the politics of the BanT-Shirts.com site, what I would like to showcase is a perfect example of a t-shirt site done right. It's clear that the folks behind this political t-shirt site have done their research on how to reach their target market through search engines.

So let's break down what all t-shirt sites should be doing to help themselves in the search engines:

• Figure out your target market (they've got this down).


• Figure out what search terms they search for (check).


• Build a site with ease of user navigatin in mind (another check. Very easy to navigate the different sections of bant-shirts)


• Describe your t-shirt designs well. (checkety check. Great descriptions on their site)


• Use the TITLE tag on your pages wisely (chiggety check. Short descriptive TITLE tags on their site. Each page with a unique descriptive TITLE)


• Put the add-to-cart buttons above the fold and easy to click (done. It's very easy to shop at bant-shirts.com)


• Find ways to include your target keywords on the site in a natural manner that will help site users AND search engines (perfectly done)


• Is the t-shirt brand you're using a selling point? Mention that on all your product pages. (done and done)
  

The only thing I would suggest to the bant-shirts.com folks (not that they asked), would be to switch from a PayPal only shopping cart to a great free shopping cart like CubeCart, which would make the "add to cart" process much smoother and open up more payment methods for customers later on (and probably help them manage their orders better).

BanT-Shirts.com does have some nicely designed t-shirts on their site. Worth noting are their Dream Big, treehugger, and I Love Free Speech designs.

If you like political t-shirts, or would just love to see an awesome example of a t-shirt site done right, head on over to BanT-Shirts.com and check out the goods.

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