As someone who likes TShirts. Wears way too many TShirts. And has always designed his own TShirts... CafePress seemed like a perfect fit. In fact, it is, if you want to create a simple, "one-off" TShirt, mug, or hat with your design on it. But not much else.

The absolutely maddening site navigation, the very limited design tools, and the awful personal "store" options really keep cafepress from seeing it's true potential.

I'm not a web amateur by any means. In fact, I write and IA websites for a living... and I have never found myself at a loss of "where to click?" as much as I have on cafepress. There are all these bright orange "go" buttons everywhere, but it's beyond frustrating to simply get to where you want to go. All of the other sites listed and reviewed here have much, much better navigation.

Once you've eventually found the appropriate design page, and uploaded your image, you're only given a "resize" option. So, if it appears too LOW on the shirt, or mug, you actually have to go BACK into PhotoShop and "build" in space around your image, and re-upload and hope it looks good. I emailed them about this, and they pretty much said "sorry! good luck!"

Now for the "personal store". What a great idea... in theory. Among the myriad problems are the fact that if you've taken the time to create a few "one-off" products at cafepress.com, and then think "hey, I should open a store!" Well, you can't. At least not with the products you've already painstakenly created. You actually have to re-create everything! (I called them about this too, and again they said "sorry!" And, if you don't want to spend the $10/month (!) for a "premium" store, you can only show one design on one "type" of shirt. So if you want one logo on a black shirt, and one logo on a blue shirt, too bad. They're both "dark shirts". Sorry! And for someone who would be lucky to sell a few shirts a YEAR, this is simply ridiculous.

Thank goodness there's other sites to choose from, like the ones reviewed here. Yes, they're a bit more expensive, but for me I'd gladly pay a few bucks more per shirt to avoid the annoyances at cafepress. Problems that are easily fixable imho, but the customer service is too removed from the site designers to make any difference.

Cafepress is a site where anyone can make a store, submitting their own art and printing it on a shirt. Some websites use Cafepress for their stores because they can’t afford to make t-shirts any other way. However, Cafepress is only really good if you’re making something personalized. If you want a shirt with one of your own photographs on it, or with your kid’s art, Cafepress is great. My brother ordered a shirt with his own face on it, and that’s undeniably hilarious. However, the shirts are not high quality, and often can wear out after too many washings. They basically use an iron-on technique that anyone could do at home with printable iron-on sheets. Cafepress is simple and accessible, but far from professional.

My first experience with CafePress was through a vegetarian Meetup group that I belong to.  The organizer of that group had made a design up on his own and ordered T-shirts through the site that had the group's logo on it.  The T-shirts were great and of high quality and I bought two of them.  After that, I went to thier website and started looking around.  What they offer and what they sell themselves is great.  They have some of the funniest and the most offensive T-shirts I have ever seen anywhere and I think its great!  Free speech baby!  I recently heard that they are making a killing on T-shirts about Sarah Palin.  What a hoot!  I would recommend this site to anyone who wants to make their own shirts or buy a readymade one that is killer.