Your Art or Photography Web Site Made Easy

Print on demand (POD) web site Red Bubble recently added Bubble Sites to their growing list of features for artists and photographers. Bubble Sites come as part of your free Red Bubble account and give you a way to sell prints or T-shirts of your art and photography from your very own stand alone, e-commerce enabled, Red Bubble powered, web site.

Red Bubble, in a very short space of time, have become a force to be reckoned with in the POD space. By offering free Bubble Sites they are effectively moving into the Cafepress Premium (paid) shops arena.

As far as I'm aware Cafepress is the only other POD site that allows you to make a stand alone shop to sell prints of your art or photos on various products. Although Red Bubble doesn't have the range of gift items of Cafepress it does have better options for high quality art prints, specifically matte prints and prints on canvas (neither of which are available from Cafepress).

Cafepress recently acquired Imagekind, which has a great range of options for high quality art prints but doesn't offer customized shops. Will Imagekind follow Red Bubble's lead?

Whatever happens with Cafepress and Imagekind I think Red Bubble has made a smart move by offering Bubble Sites for free. Not only that but they are very easy to set up. If you already have a Red Bubble portfolio then setting up your Bubble site is as simple as:

Give your site a name.
Enter some homepage introductory text.
Enter text for your about me page.
Choose an image from your existing portfolio to feature on your homepage.
Save and your done.

If you want you can split your gallery up into sub galleries which is a simple process of adding folders then dragging and dropping images into them. Easy!

Bubble Sites are very new (launched two days prior to me writing this) and will eventually be more customizable cosmetically however the very basic site is clean, reasonably professional and more than effective as an online shop. Especially since Red Bubble ships to more than 70 countries and has options to display prices in five different currencies.

An added bonus is that your shops URL is short and easy to remember (providing your Red Bubble login name is easy to remember). If you'd like to see an example of a Bubble site then mine is at:

TET's Cats
http://etourist.redbubble.com/

If you're and artist or photographer, with no idea how to set up your own e-commerce site then Red Bubble's Bubble Sites is definitely for you. So simple to sell prints of your work - you won't even need to ask the kids to manage your site for you!

If you can take a good photo or produce great artwork, upload them to Red Bubble, set up your site and start promoting and marketing. It's almost that easy.

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