Introducing WardTog.com!

Well this has certainly been long overdue, but I would like to introduce my latest personal website, WardTog.com. If you're at all familiar with Zazzle, you'll notice that there are some elements on WardTog that are strikingly similar to what you see on Zazzle. This is because WardTog.com is actually a site that I built on top of Zazzle's framework. It's an opportunity for me to better showcase and market specific t-shirts, mugs, hats and other products that I've created on Zazzle.

WardTog.com logo

So what exactly is WardTog.com? Well, quoted directly from the website, "WardTog gear is THE perfect way to express your love and pride for your country, state or city." Let's say you're like me and you spent your entire childhood growing up in one location. Let's call that place Houston, Texas. Then you moved out to the San Francisco Bay Area to attend Stanford University. In the Bay Area, you're one of few people from Texas, let alone Houston, so you want to buy some gear that'll show off your pride for Houston. Well, you're in luck because WardTog has you covered. Check these out:

WardTog tee shirts, coffee mugs, trucker hats, bumper stickers and other products make great gifts too! And with over 900 cities, states & countries with nearly 20 designs (more on the way!), there's a good chance that you'll find whatever you're looking for. Every country in the world is represented along with at least its capital city (the bigger countries also have other popular cities), and every state within the United States has products along with its capital city and other bigger cities.

You may be wondering where the name WardTog came from. The name WardTog is actually a compound name composed of two words: ward (a division/district of a city/town) and tog (an Old-English word for clothes). Put them together and you get hometown gear, which is exactly what WardTog is all about. If you're interested in learning more about WardTog and how it all runs, feel free to check out the About WardTog page.

WardTog.com Home Page

I actually launched WardTog 3 months ago in mid-March, but I was waiting to officially announce it until it had a good set of features. I also wanted to give Google and the other search engines time to crawl the site and index it. In addition to simple navigation to various locations, the WardTog home page has search capabilities (thanks to Google Site Search), shows the most popular, best-selling and recently sold gifts, and displays information about the featured location (currently China).

The home page also has my favorite feature. It shows you gift recommendations based upon where you're accessing the site from. Underneath the search section, you should see a list of products from a particular location. This should be where (or close to where) you are right now. For me it says Hayward, California Gifts. It took quite a bit of time to get that all working. The same logic that shows those recommended gifts on the WardTog home page, also shows the gifts recommendations on every page of BenMVP.com on the right-hand side.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the site so far. I've made two sales through the site as well (I sell lots directly on Zazzle). I need to work on marketing the site so that it can get more traffic. There are many more features I have planned to add, so it should keep me busy for a good while. Not that I'm not already busy enough planning a wedding...

Happy shopping!