website design software south africa

website design software south africa

hi, i’m lucas and in this video i’m goingto show you how to get your own, custom branded ecommerce website up and running on the shopifyplatform in under 25 minutes, even if you have no design or coding skills. for those of you who don’t know, shopifyis a fully hosted, turnkey ecommerce solution that allows you to easily setup and run abeautiful online store. i’ll take you through the process of startinga store from scratch, including how to add products, how to customize the look and feelof your site, how to set up your shipping options, how to add a custom domain and more. by the end of this tutorial, you’ll havea fully functional ecommerce website ready

to accept orders. and the cool thing aboutit is; we can do all this while using shopify on a free 14 day trial. alright, let’s get started. we’ll want to type our email into the boxthere and then create our password and the name of our store. don’t worry if you haven’tdecided on the name of your store yet - you can easily go back and change your store namelater. i’m going to be selling shopify t-shirts, so i’ll go with shopify t-shirt co. andclick “create your store now”. and it will just take a few moments to create our store so shopify wants to know where we would liketo sell - we have the option of an online

store and or a retail store or pop up location.again, we’ll focus on creating an online store for this tutorial. we’ll want to addour address so we can set up our shop’s currency. again shopify just wants to know a bit moreabout our plans so they can better cater to our needs.do we have products to sell? i’ll be starting from scratch - so i’ve selected “i haven'tyet started selling products.” but of course select the one that best describes your situation. and “what will you sell?” i’ll be sellingt-shirts so i’ll select physical products. and then i’ll click “take me to my store”. now that we’ve created our online storewe’ll find ourselves within the shopify

admin dashboard. it’s best to think of thedashboard as the control center for all the operations we’ll perform on our shopifystore. if at anytime we want to see what your storewill look like, we can easily click on this handy icon here. and also it’s worth noting that our storewill be password protected until we are ready to launch, at which point we can very easilydisable our password and make our store live to the public. alright, let’s get started.so the first thing we want to do is add a product - even if we don’t have a productto sell yet, we’ll want to add a test one,

so we can start to visualize our store. to start, we’ll select the products tabfrom the panel on the left. so on this page we can add all the detailsof our product. the first thing we can do is name our product. next up is product description and this informationwill be displayed with our product images. if you’re carrying products that are notyour own, we suggest you avoid copying the manufacturer’s description, because you’llwant your product pages to look unique to a search engine. the product type; in our case t-shirts.

vendor - this refers to the manufacturer orthe vendor who sold the product to us. this okay, so next we have the inventory and variantssection. in this section we can set up the different options for our product. the firstthing we can do is add the price of our t-shirt, let’s say $15 and if we had a price thatwas higher before, or if we want our customers to see our product as on sale -we can adda higher compare at price. if we have a sku or bar code for our productwe can add it here. “require shipping address”. if we’reselling a digital product or service or really anything that’s not going in the mail wecan uncheck “require shipping address” but we’ll leave that checked off.

if we are shipping our product we should addthe weight. it’s best to include the weight of the packaging as well. let’s say 0.5kg. so shopify gives us the option of whetheror not we want to track our inventory. we can easily add our quantity and when our quantityreaches zero - subtracted once for every product sold - our product will be marked as soldout and customers will no longer be able to order that product. we actually have a fewvariations of this t-shirt so we’ll revisit inventory in just a second. we also have the option to allow customersto order our product even if it’s out of stock - this creates a back order type ofsituation.

okay, product options: this allows us to addthe different variables or different options of our product. here we can add our sizes- simply type them in and separate them with a comma. we plan to sell small, medium and large shirtsand we can also add other options like colour. and shopify automatically create the variantsfor this shirt, giving us 6 options. we can take a closer look by unclicking theautomatically creates 6 variants box and now we can add how much inventory we have of eachproduct. let’s say we have 10 in each variation of this shirt. next, we’re going to upload our productimage. now, we already have our product photos

but if you need some tips on how to take greatproduct photos, we have some great resources on our blog - which i’ve linked to in thedescription of this video. okay, so like i said, we’ve got a blue shirtand a green one. let’s add both these photos. so our product image has been added, and i'm going to go ahead and save our progress by scrolling up to the top and clicking the save button. okay, let's head back down and we can decide which photo we want featured by grabbing it with our mouse and moving it over.this will be the only image that is shown before we click on this particular product. - so let’s head back to our inventoryand variants and let’s tell shopify which

images are the blue t-shirt and which arethe green ones. to do this, we’ll click the camera iconhere and you can see our variants pop up. i’ll click the appropriate one and hit save. okay, collections - collections are used toorganize our products into relevant groups or products that have things in common. thisis our first product and we haven’t set up any collections yet but there is a default“frontpage” collection - which will actually feature this product on our home page - solet’s add it to that for now. tags. so product tags are used as any easyway to organize products within our store. we’ll try to include a bunch of relevantinformation - again enter each tag and separate

them with a comma. okay, search engines - this section is forsearch engine optimization. shopify automatically generates a page title and page meta descriptionbased on the information we’ve entered in the product details sections - but of courseyou customize it if you wish. these details help determine how our products show up insearch engines like google, or yahoo. visibility. if this is a product we are workingon ahead of time and not ready to launch to the public we can leave this hidden. but ifwe want it to appear in our store, we’ll select visible. when we’re done we can click save and justlike that we’ve added our first product.now,

i’m going to quickly go through the processa few more times and add 5 more products just so we can better visualize our store. i’dencourage everyone to do the same. okay so we’ve got 6 products now, let’stake a peek at what our website is looking like.alright, so this our home page or front page - and we can see all the products here thatwe’ve added to our “frontpage” collection. if we click on any of these products we willbe taken to their product page, where we can see the different photos and our product description. okay, so now that we’ve added a few products,it’s time to customize the look of our store. to do this we’ll head over to our themessection.

so the theme of a shopify store controls allaspects of the store’s appearance and layout. now, shopify actually automatically sets usup with an introductory theme called “launchpad”, which you just saw. this is a great starter them and it mightsuit all our needs but let’s quickly head over to the theme store and see if anythingelse grabs our eye. okay, so we’re now in the shopify themesstore and scrolling down we can see that there are 100s of themes. personally, i’d likea free theme, that is mobile responsive - so let’s narrow our results a little bit here. to do this, we’ll select free from the leftside and we’ll also filter by features and

select “responsive” and we’re sellingt-shirts so we’ll narrow it even more to our industry. our list of themes have been narrowed downsignificantly and i like the way the react theme looks. this particular theme comes with3 different styles and i’m kind of drawn to the oak & co theme and we’ll just quicklyview the demo here to get a better view. cool, so i’m pretty satisfied with the overalllayout of this theme so let’s close the demo and we’ll go ahead and click get theme. okay, so it’s just letting us know thatwe’re about to install this theme to our store and we’ll click to publish it. it’lljust take a few moments to download the theme.

awesome, so it’s installed - let’s headover to our theme manager. we can also access our themes manager fromthe panel on the left hand side and from within our themes manager we can easily customizeour theme.okay let’s take a quick look at the theme we just installed to see where we’reat. awesome- as you can see the home page is apretty blank slate, except for the products that we’ve added to our frontpage collection.we’ll definitely want to add a nice banner image, and logo and maybe write some copyto start giving our store some personality and character. let’s head back to our themesmanager and click on customize theme. so the cool thing about shopify is that wedon’t need to know code, or necessarily

even be very tech savvy to be able to tweakand edit the design options of our store. we can see all the colours for our theme here,and we can easily change those colours. as we scroll down we’ll see that we can customizeour typography our fonts and font sizes and there are plenty of things we can play aroundwith. first things first, we’ll want to get ourlogo in there and to do this, we’ll open up the “header” tab and this is wherewe can upload a custom logo. let’s click off that box there and select choose file.for this particular theme, it’s suggested that our logo be no more than 700 pixels inwidth. i’ve already got my logo created so i’ll select it now.

okay, let’s publish changes and take a look. and as you can see our logo has been addedto our store. next let’s add a photo to that big banner image to give our store somepersonality. again, it’s important to note the pixel ratio that our theme is suggesting- in this case we want the width to be 966 pixels wide and we’ll want to keep the heightof our images consistent if we plan on adding multiple images. let’s head back to our theme’s editorand for this we’ll open up the “homepage” section. okay let's locate slideshow image one and choose file - i’ve alreadyoptimized our images so i’ll just locate

i've already optimized our images so i'll just locate it here. let’s publish that and take a peek. great - as you can see our image has beenadded and that really spices up our store a bit. we can also add additional photos toour slideshow here if we like but i’m pretty happy with having just one image for now,so what i’m going to do is head back to our theme settings and let it know i onlywant to display one image. for this we'll open up the "homepage" tab and let’s locate “slideshow image 2” anduncheck the display option. we’ll click publish changes and make surethat’s working.

awesome, looks good. so our store is startingto look pretty good and i think it’s a good time to add some copy to our store to giveit a bit more personality and character. let’s start with an “about us” page. to do this we’ll click on the pages tabon our left panel. as you can see there’s already an “about us” page setup and readyfor us to customize. as shopify points out, a great “about us”page helps you build trust between you and your customers so you’ll want to take thetime to craft a really solid write up. try to include who you are, why you sell theitems you sell, and all other relevant information. the “about us” page is a real opportunityto share your story with your potential customers

so try to focus on what makes you and yourproducts unique. so shopify makes it very easy to format ourposts. we can bold and italicize words and even add photos and videos to our post byusing these icons. i'll just add a “team photo” to give ourabout us page as an example. we’ll select upload file - and choose ourphoto. now we’ll want to select our photo and choose the size. and shopify wants toknow what size we want the photo to insert as. i’ve already cropped mine to the sizei want - so i’ll select the “original size” option. awesome - we can see our photo has been addedand i personally think it would look better

if it was in the center so, i’m going toclick on the image and select alignment from our toolbar and click “center align”. let’s hit save and take a look. and i'm just going to refresh - cool, so we'll just click on the "about us" section. awesome, so we can see its been customized - our photo is right there in the middle and it looks great let's head back to our admin - okay, let’s head back to our pages. as wecan see there’s also a “frontpage” section set up in addition to our “about us” page.this is the text that will show up on our

front page. right here - and this text offersus a chance to welcome customers to our store or communicate our message or mission to ourcustomers as soon as they land on our website. now, we’ll probably want to change the title- let’s go with “welcome” and we’ll just add a quick message. cool, let’s save and take a look. and thereis our welcome message - i’m happy with that. so, just below our welcome message there isa “contact us” section. i’ll quickly show you how to update that. for this we’ll head back to our theme’smanager and customize theme. we’ll open

up the footer section and we can see the contactinformation is here. if we have a physical address we can add it or any other informationwe might think is relevant. the bracket br slash bracket is used to put a break in betweenlines so shopify store, space attention online here - i'll show you. so shopify store - space - attention departement space etc. we strongly suggest that you do display yourcontact information somewhere on your website, just so customers can easily reach you ifthey have a question. but if you don’t want this information, we can also very easilyjust turn that off if we don’t want to display our contact information on the front page.also, you have may have noticed these social

links on bottom of our store. to facebook,twitter and all the others. so, shopify has made this very easy to link these to our socialchannels. again, we’re in the footer section of ourtheme’s editor and all we have to do is paste the appropriate link in the correspondingsection. if we don’t use a certain social channel,we’ll simply leave the field blank and the icon will be removed from our page. let’ssay we don’t have a vimeo account - we’ll just delete the link here. and right now theselinks have defaulted to link to shopify’s channels - so let’s change the twitter linkso it links to my account. and we’ll publish the changes and have a look.

so the vimeo icon is now gone - and the twittericon now links to where we want. okay so, our store is looking pretty good- we’ve added products to our catalog, we’ve added an “about us” section. what we cannow do is add our first blog post. to do this, we’ll head over to the lefthand panel and select “blog posts”. to add new blog posts we can simply select theadd a blog post button from the top right corner - but much like the about us section,there is a template setup for our first blog okay - so like the other pages our title isthe first thing we can add. again, we can very easily format our text,add photos, videos - we can add links. then we have an excerpt section - which isreally great, especially if we have more than

one blog post on our page. this section isthe preview or teaser for our blog post that will be displayed on our main blog page. let’s add a bit of text. beneath this area we can determine the authorof the blog post. we can choose which blog it’s in and even create a new blog for it.we’ll keep ours in “news” for now. next, we can add some relevant tags - theseare similar to the product tags in that they help with the organization of our blog andbelow tags, we have the search engines section. much like when we were adding a product, thissection is for search engine optimization. the information helps determine how our blogpost will be displayed in search engines like

google. and this section has automatically been createdfrom the information above but of course we can customize it if we like. next, we have the visibility section - whichlets us choose if our blog post is live on our site. it will default to “hidden”and we can switch to visible if we’re ready to publish it. this really comes in handyif we’re working on a post and we want to revisit it later. we also have the optionto schedule a post to be published on a specific date. okay let’s save and have a look.

so here’s our first blog post - you cansee only the excerpt section is immediately visible and once we select the post we canread our whole blog post. cool, so our store is looking pretty solid,we’ve added products, we’ve added a theme, and we’ve customized it to give it somepersonality and character. let’s keep on moving and head back to ouradmin and go over to our settings on the left hand panel and select payments. so, one of the most important parts of runninga business is being able to take payments securely and shopify makes this just as easyas anything else. for merchants in the us and canada our stores have automatically beenset up with shopify payments, which allows

us to start accepting payments from all majorcredit cards instantly. all we have to do is click to “completeshopify payments account set up” and fill out the relevant information. and for our merchants outside of the us, andcanada, don’t worry - shopify has integrated with over 70 different payment partners sothere are plenty of hassle free options available. additionally, as soon as we open our shopifystore, we will be set up with a paypal express checkout account with the email we used tosign up for our shopify store. as soon as we receive our first order through paypalexpress checkout, paypal will send us an email that contains the link and instructions tocomplete our paypal account set-up and claim

our funds. okay, next up let’s quickly set up our shippingoptions. to do this we’ll select the shipping tab on our left panel. okay, within the shipping page we can decidewhich countries we want to ship to - looks like we’ve already been set up with somebasic shipping rates. we have a standard shipping option for canada,which is based on weight - so anything between 0-5kg will cost $10 and for heavy goods shippingit’s set up to charge $20 for anything between 5kg and 20kg in weight. we can open each of these options here andeasily change the price per weight or even

if we want to base our shipping off purchaseprice instead of weight. let’s say we want to make deliveries in canada free with ordersover $75. we’ll change our price range to $75 and up and and make our shipping price$0. we can also select what regions we want toship to. if we uncheck the box from a region we will no longer offer shipping to that area. additionally, we can decide whether or notwe want to charge more money for certain areas. nunavut for example is pretty remote so we’lladd an additional $10 to our shipping rate. and then we’ll click save. we also have a basic international shippingrate set up. we can easily tweak these rates

as well or perhaps lets say we want to shiponly to the united states and canada - we can very easily remove shipping to the restof the world. shopify just wants to confirm this is what we wanted to do. and we’ll click add country search for theunited states - i’ll select to add the default federal tax rates and the default tax ratesfor the regions. and then select “add country” from there we can very easily edit and setup our shipping rates much like we did with our canadian rates. okay, so we’ve added products, we’ve selectedand customized a theme, added an about us page and set up shipping and payments. whatwe can do now is register a custom web address.

let’s head over to the “domains” section. we have the option to register an existingdomain if we already have one or the option to register a new one if we don’t. so we can choose from a bunch of domains - .com,.info, .org and this really takes the hassle out of finding a domain name - you can searchto see if your domain name is available right within shopify and the domains are even offeredat a discounted price - generally we can expect to pay about $15/year for a .com address. as you can see the domain shopifytshirtco.comis available and we can easily purchase it. and there you go, just like that, you’reall set up with your custom branded ecommerce

website. if you’re looking for more information we’velinked to a bunch of great resources in the description of this video that might be usefulto you on your journey of running an ecommerce website. i’d also encourage you to takea look through the shopify app store, which has 100s of apps that can extend the functionalityof your shopify store. there are a variety of free and paid apps that offer powerfulfeatures, and services in a number of different categories. if you have any questions please don’t hesitateto leave a comment below - and if you found this video helpful, please let us know byclicking the like button. thanks for watching.

ready to put what you learned into action? click to head over to shopify.com and sign up for you free 14 day trial.

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