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Building Web Results

Make sure your search engine marketing dollars are paying off by continuously increasing your conversion rates and Return on Investment (ROI).

Sunbelt Web Solutions goes beyond optimization and looks at the bigger picture -- your ROI.

• If you are in the business of selling online, you understand the value of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for attracting more customers to your website. Though the importance of SEO is relevant, what happens after you get visitors to your website? It is important to understand their needs and present your products or services to help convert visitors to customers.
  
  
• Blueliner specializes in tracking, reporting and implementing strategies that convert visitors into customers. We use the best internet marketing tools in the industry to track all campaigns and use the top marketing minds to implement strategies to help your conversion rates.

We represent the little guy.

• Having a huge budget to continue brand awareness and increase annual revenues is what Fortune 500 companies do best. But if you are just starting out or would like to take your small or mid-sized business to the next level, taking advantage of the Internet is highly advisable. We not only serve small business, but we are a small business and understand that achieving results is the primary objective to any Internet Marketing strategy.

Decorating Tips

Logo Design

Following the tips below can help assure the artwork you provide will achieve the dynamic results you want when your logo is screen printed or embroidered on your wearables. It can also help increase the efficiency and quality of the decorating process. Art that is "ready" for use is provided in an electronic file that can be used for pre-press and printing without making modifications. Below are a number of important considerations and tips to help get your art ready for decorating.

Acceptable Artwork Formats

Art may be provided in any of the following formats. Please note the modifications that may need to be made it order to make each format ready for decorating.

For all three formats, proper resolution is critical for clean results. The standard resolution for printed artwork is 300 dpi (dots per inch).

Mechanical artwork

The traditional standard for acceptable mechanical artwork is "camera-ready black and white." Mechanical artwork can be supplied on a sheet of white paper or bromide, and should be no larger than 8.5" x 11".

Hand-drawn artwork

A logo that's been drawn by hand is a great starting point, but it will need to be digitized and modified for practical use.

Digital artwork

Images created in Adobe Illustrator, QuarkXPress, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Word, Excel, or Powerpoint are preferred over mechanical and hand-drawn artwork for quality of the end result and efficiency. However, digital artwork may still require modification and/or preparation for the decorating process.

File suffixes

If your digital artwork file ends with any of these suffixes, it can be used to properly prepare your art: .bmp, .eps, .gif, .pct, .pdf, .tiff

Proofs

Any time you supply digital artwork, be sure to include a printed proof for reference. Disk formats: When providing your artwork on disk, it is best to use one of these more standard.

Disk formats

CD-Rom, 100-megabyte Zip, or regular floppy. 250-megabyte Zip, Jazz drive disks, and Syquest disks are also acceptable.

E-mailed art

When sending your artwork via e-mail, be sure to provide all of the basic elements, including: - fonts - layers - paths Unacceptable Artwork Formats Artwork provided in the following forms, or similar forms, will not be able to be modified into ready art... therefore delivering extremely poor results when translated into decoration for a garment:

- on a fax sheet
- scanned into a computer
- on a business card
- on a printed promotional item such as a napkin or matchbook cover

Logo Placement

Consider these lesser-used, but highly-noticeable garment locations for a unique logo/artwork placement.

Size Selection and Group Buying Guide

The following guidelines can help you streamline your buying and, therefore, boost your profits.

Buying for Men: Any style listed as Adult are sized for men. Adult Golf-cut styles generally offer a better fit for beefier male builds.

Buying for Ladies: Styles listed as Ladies' are women’s sizes. If the women on your team prefer a Men’s or Adult style, select one size smaller than what they would wear in Ladies' sizes.

Buying for Groups: Use the charts below for a general percentage to help you determine how many shirts in each size you need when buying for a group.

To calculate your buying quantities by size, simply multiply the number of people in your group by the percentage in the chart for each size.

Golf Shirts			Wovens			Outerwear
Size	Men's/Adult	Ladies	Size	Men's/Adult	Ladies	Size	Men's/Adult	Ladies
S	2%	13%	S	3%	19%	S	1%	10%
M	13%	37%	M	13%	39%	M	13%	35%
L	36%	33%	L	37%	29%	L	37%	39%
XL	36%	15%	XL	34%	10%	XL	34%	15%
2XL	11%	2%	2XL	11%	3%	2XL	11%	1%
3XL	1%		3XL	1%		3XL	1%
4XL	1%		4XL	1%		4XL	1%

These are general guidelines only and should only be used as a starting point for determining necessary quantities. Your group sizes may vary greatly.

Embroidery Tips

Estimating Stitch Count

Here is an easy way to estimate the amount of stitches you’ll need for great looking logos.

- Print out the grid below
- Cut out your artwork and place it over the grid
- Count the number of boxes it fills, then find that number in the chart
- If your design goes outside the grid, estimate the extra grid space you need and add it to your original total.

Other Points to Remember when Estimating a Stitch Count

- 1 solid square inch of embroidery equals approximately 2,000 stitches.
- 1 solid square 1/4 inch of embroidery will equal about 125 stitches.
- No letter should be smaller than 3/16" each letter 1/4" in height equals about 100 stitches.
- Drop shadows in your logo will translate to 200 extra stitches per inch.
- Straight lines under logos typically require 200 extra stitches per inch.
- Fabrics, colors, and artwork detail will affect the amount of stitches.

It is important to remember that these stitch-count tips, and the stitch-count grid, provide estimates only. They are a good starting point to arrive at a ballpark count, but the precise figure can only be determined when the actual embroidery of your design is performed.

Note: Due to differences in computers and printers, the size of the grid may be distorted when you print it out. Be sure to check that 1-inch squares actually measure 1 inch on your printout (do the same for 1/4-inch squares). If such a size distortion occurs, you can scale your printout of the grid to a more accurate size using a photocopier.

Camera-Ready Artwork

Preparing Artwork for Commercial Printing

The term camera ready artwork, although constantly used, is rather inaccurate anymore. In the modern world of desktop publishing, where artwork is prepared on a computer, all-digital artwork has become the status quo throughout the printing industry. Most printing companies no longer use a camera to shoot film or printing plates.

Properly Prepared Art Files

Although computers have transformed the entire printing process, some old issues persist: properly prepared artwork. Receiving customer-supplied artwork that is truely ready to print "as is" has always been a challenge. Now that nearly every customer has a computer has only exasperated the problem.

If you are inexperienced with creating digital art files, a preliminary consulation with a pre-press professional is recommended before you begin the design process. A few minutes on the phone can yield better results and save you time and possibly even money. Find out what file formats they accept to be sure you use a software program that your printing facility supports or won't charge you extra to process.

Another example – recommended photo resolution has been 300 dpi for years, but many modern printing plates and presses now are capable of reproducing a much finer dot pattern. Some printing facilities are capable of producing near photo-quality as long as the art files provided are of high enough resolution. In most cases your images should be at least 350 dpi for the highest quality results.

Common Reasons Artwork is Not Print-Ready Include:

• Wrong Document Size
• No Bleed
• Insufficient Margin
• Low Image Resolution
• Incorrect Color Usage
• Missing Fonts

Document Size should always be set to the (flat) finished size of the final product. Many people just leave their document size at 8.5" X 11" (the default letter-size). Setting the document size correctly is important in order to make sure that the you and your printer understand what the margin are on the final product. Your printer needs the art prepared with the correct document size for other technical reasons as well. If you are unsure of the size, such as the dimensions of a "standard" business envelope, find out before preparing the artwork.

Bleed is when anything is to print the very edges of the finished product: a line, photo, illustration, background, etc. that will "run off the edge" of the paper. Whatever you want to bleed must be positioned PAST the document edges where you want it to bleed. This is due to minor variations in printing, trimming, folding, etc. to ensure that there is no exposed paper on the edge(s). The industry standard is 0.125" (1/8") past the document edge.

Margin is the opposite of bleed: anything that you do NOT want to get cut off shouldn't be placed too close to the document edges. Margin space is especially important regarding text. Due to minor variations of the production equipment involved, you need a clear margin of free space around your art. Industry standard is to never place anything closer than 0.125" (1/8") to the document edge.

Image Resolution - all photos and other raster art should be at least 300 to 350 dpi to ensure that they print clearly. Anything lower than this may result in blurry, bit-mapped or pixelated quality.

Note: images "borrowed" from a website are only 72 dpi. Although they " look fine on screen," they are not appropriate for commercial quality printing unless scaled down to 25% of the original size. Typically, when web images are reduced by 75%, they will be too small to be suitable for your needs. An exception to this guildline is signage or any other graphic that is typically not viewed close up, where 72 dpi may look acceptable (as long as you don't enlarge the image).

DO NOT scan previously printed images (known as re-screens). Scanned re-screens, when printed, will contain a strange looking pattern called a moire unless you blur the halftone scan to remove all of the dot patterns. NOTE: even a proof from the printer will not normally reveal a moire problem, as most digital proofs are are printed with a continuous tone, not halftones. The moire will not become apparent until your project is already plated and on the printing press.

Ink Colors - CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black) is the industry standard color space for full-color commercial printing. There are also Pantone Solid Colors for "spot color" printing (such as 2-color printing). Using the wrong ink colors for a given type of printing in your artwork can unexpected results.

If you want full-color printing and your printer is using modern equipment, artwork received using Pantone, Solid Colors or RGB (Web) colors may simply be converted into CMYK format automatically, but this may cause some colors to change significantly from how they appeared on your computer monitor.

Supplying artwork with incorrect colors to printers using older equipment (or those lacking the proper experience & knowledge) may result in the incorrect colors used not printing at all, as they are never imaged onto the printing plates at all.

Check your color separations: all document components (text, images, backgrounds, etc.) should be prepared for the color mode in which it will be printed: CMYK, Spot-Color or Greyscale. A color-separated PDF is an excellent way to cross-check your work for accuracy.

Unless you have a calibrated monitor, your artwork is likely to have slightly different colors when printed. Professional graphic designers should use Pantone Color Charts (available in both Solid Colors and Process Colors) to ensure expected color results.

Font Issues - There are literally thousands of type fonts available, and no printing company has them all. Even when graphic designers uses very common typefaces, be aware there are often several font foundries that make the exact same font. Substituting fonts with the same name, but created by different font foundries, can sometimes cause problems. A printing facility may substitute their version of Helvetica Italic, for example, for another version of Helvetica Italic. These font substitutions are usually insignificant, but occasionally tracking (font spacing) can change enough to throw the ending of a sentence into an photo or illustration. There are three solutions to avoiding a font substitution scenario with your printing project:

Outline Your Fonts - many design programs, including Adobe Illustrator, InDesign & CorelDraw, have a method of turning the type fonts into objects, so they are no longer a type font. Obviously you will need to make a copy of the digital file first, as the typesetting will no longer be editable. This method will eliminate any possibility of a font problem without losing any quality, such as rasterizing the art.

Supply Your Fonts - many design programs (including Adobe InDesign, Quark Xpress and Microsoft Publisher) can automatically collect all of the fonts that you used in your project and put them in a folder for you to supply to printing facility. Adobe InDesign calls this process "package," in Quark "collect for output," and in Publisher "pack and go."

Make a PDF - there are many advantages of making a PDF of your finished artwork. One of these advantages is that all of the fonts are embedded into the PDF file, so anyone that you send it to is guaranteed to see the type font exactly as you intended for them to look.

Final Considerations

Before Sending Your Artwork to a Commercial Printer

Check your artwork for spelling mistakes and grammar; most programs have built-in spell check capabilities. Double check to make sure all images used are high resolution and embedded into the document. If the images are linked, you will need to supply the printing company the original images too. Make sure that bleed and margins are correct, and check ink colors for proper color separations.

Making PDF Files

with Crop Marks & Bleed for a Commercial Printer

Adobe, as well as many other software programs, have built-in capabilities of making a PDF file. Many programs rely on Adobe Distiller for turning files into PDF documents, so it may also need to be installed to generate a PDF file. Although Adobe is the industry "standard," there is other (less expensive) software available, and some are even free: PDF995, AcroPDF and CutePDF.

The only challenge may be finding where your PDF creating dialogue is located for your particular software and configuration. It may be located by one or more of three possibilities:

• FILE > SAVE AS … and look for PDF as a choice
• FILE > EXPORT … and look for PDF as a choice
• FILE > PRINT … and look in the choices of available print devices (such as PDF995)

Print to File PDF Method

Choose FILE > PRINT to use the print-to-file method & open the dialogue box

By default, the dialogue box opens on the General setting.

Since this file bleeds, change the setting to the Marks and Bleed section.

Set the PRINTER to PDF. In the MARKS section, check "Trim Marks."

In the BLEEDS section, Uncheck the "Use Document Bleed Settings." Set the bleed to 0.125" on all four sides.

Note: if the units are not in inches, it can be changed in the preferences section.

Now switch back to the GENERAL setting in the dialogue box and set the MEDIA size to "custom."

In the preview box you should be able to see the document, as well as the bleed and crop marks.

In my case, the MEDIA size was already on "custom," so to get it to the desired sized it was switched to any other setting, and then put back to "custom" to get it to resize automatically to accommodate for the bleed and crop marks.

Under the OUTPUT section, set the "Printer Resolution."

Most printing presses print at 150-175lpi (lines per inch), so 175 should be an adequate resolution setting to obtain the best printing quality possible.

Any setting beyond what the printing press is even capable of will not yield better quality printing, only a much bigger PDF; the printer has RIP software that will down-sample an unnecessarily large file anyway. A few commercial printers do have printing presses that will print at resolutions over 200lpi.

To make the PDF, click the PRINT button in the interface and direct the dialogue box as to where you wish to put the PDF file.

Save as PDF Method

Choose FILE > SAVE AS … to save the file as a PDF

Choose FILE > SAVE AS and choose PDF as the file type.

In the dialogue box (in the GENERAL section) under "Adobe PDF Preset" use the drop-down menu and choose "Press Quality."

This will make a high resolution PDF for printing on a printing press.

The only other tab you need to make changes to is the "Marks and Bleeds" section.

Select TRIM MARKS and set the bleed to 0.125" on all four sides.

The simply select the "Save PDF" button and direct the dialogue box as to where you wish to put the PDF file.

There is much discussion as to what is the "best" way to make a PDF file for commercial printing. Many insist that one should save as or print to a Postscript file FIRST, and than launch the Adobe Acrobat Distiller to make the PDF file. Some commercial printers have their own custom presets for the Adobe Distiller with setting just the way they want a PDF made.

Holiday Gift Catalogs

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