Complete eCommerce Tutorial 2021 - Make An Online Store With WordPress! (For Beginners)

hey everyone welcome back to the channel in this video i'm going to show you step by step how to create an online store an e-commerce website with as little effort as possible but at the same time making a website that can scale with you as your business grows so in this video we're going to be using something called woocommerce which runs on wordpress and this is incredibly popular for several reasons the first one is that both woocommerce and wordpress are free which means that you're only going to have to spend money on your domain and your hosting making this again a very affordable and versatile option the second reason is because wordpress as many people probably know powers about one third of the internet it's one of the most popular ways to make a website and because of that because it's so large you have a lot of functionality a lot of apps and plugins and themes and all of these give you tons of options for how your how your online store will look but also gives you tons of options for what kind of functionality you want and how you want to expand as you grow your store so the benefit here is that you could very easily find a theme find a template and in maybe 10 minutes have a website up and running but if you wanted to you could really customize that you could spend the time and make it more advanced or maybe you just want to start with a simple one now and in a year in two years whenever it might be in the future you can expand and add more functionality then so the objective here like i said is really to make a website that is robust and simple now that can grow with you as your as your store and as your brand really starts to take off so with that being said you really don't need any kind of background for websites i'll explain absolutely everything and make this as simple as possible for beginners so if you don't know anything like if you don't know what a domain is that's absolutely fine we'll cover all that in this video and my goal here is to show you guys step by step how to do this without needing to understand any technical details but i'll add them in there in case you're interested so you can better understand how your website works now with that being said let's head over to my laptop i want to start off by showing you guys uh where we're going to get our hosting and our domain which is the first step for making your online store and then later on the video i'll show you how to set up blog posts how to set up a theme make your website look really good as well as how to list different products so if you're trying to sell a physical product a digital product that's downloadable a digital product that they could stream it could be something like a variable product a group product lots and lots of different basically anything you could imagine selling there is a way to do that with woocommerce it's incredibly powerful and again very very popular so we'll talk about that later on in the video and then we'll wrap up the video talking about some general marketing things and and what to do once your website is actually made and what the next steps are really to make sure that it starts gaining traffic and is ready for google and is ready for customers and is you know overall just as robust as possible so like i said let's head over to my laptop first and we're going to start off with some hosting and in order to do this we're going to go to centralmedia.com siteground and that will bring you makes you all on the same page and you get this discount right here where it's bringing it from as you can see about percent off we're looking at fifteen dollars a month is now down to five dollars a month uh similarly we're looking at twenty five dollars a month is now eight dollars a month and so these are the plans we have available okay so actually let's rewind a little bit before we spend any money here just so i can explain exactly what we're doing so when you're looking at a website you can think of it as a document think of it as like a word document that you're typing up and there's a couple aspects to this the first one is what you're typing on if it's a microsoft word document if it's google docs if it's apple equivalent whatever it might be that is the equivalent of wordpress wordpress is one of the many ways you can make a website so you can think of wordpress like microsoft word just a place to go to make your website then once you have your document you can't just close out of it you have to save it somewhere and the place you save it is say it's on your hard drive on your computer whatever it might be that is the equivalent of what a host is so once you make your website on wordpress you need to save it somewhere you can't just close out or else it's going to go away and you lose all your work so saving it somewhere is essentially what your host is and you're going to pay them because it does take physical storage space to actually save your your document or your website in this situation and then of course your domain is going to be the name that people type in in their little address bar to navigate to your website you could think of this as like the file name on your document is essentially the same situation here so people can type in your domain it'll redirect them to where your website is saved on the host and they're able to see your website so hopefully that kind of brings a little bit of light to this and makes it a little more clear the host like i said is where we're saving and really managing a lot of our website so we have three options here and since we're using uh this to really make an online store you want to keep in mind which plan is actually going to be the best for you and there are plenty of other hosts out there as well i'll leave some links below but we generally recommend siteground especially when it comes to something like an online store something that's going to be generating you a lot of capital and with that of course you want to make sure you have great uptime you want to have a very reliable and robust option and siteground we think is the best option for this now looking at these three plans the first one is is probably the best if you're just getting started out if you don't have any traffic and you're really just trying to get your feet wet keep in mind you can always upgrade these plans further on down the road but starting off with five dollars a month is a pretty modest little investment i'm going to go with grow big that's a little bit better for me because it allows a little more space for more visitors and for more storage of of documents or photos or whatever i end up uploading it does give you a little bit more on there of course we could actually compare all of the plans if we click on this on the bottom and it'll give you some more details about what the differences actually are like i said you get a lot of the stuff similar between these you have like a lot of site tools a 30-day money-back guarantee 100 renewable energy match which is again really nice to see that especially if you're looking to make your business a little more green that's a really positive thing to see there now as you go down you'll see that we do eventually hit some some of the differences right here so for example like ultra fast php it's going to be on the grow big so as you start to get more traffic that is going to be more important your load speed all types of things like that really you get a lot with all these plans but i recommend on your own time read through these and figure out which one is the best for your brand now of course for this video right here this is not a real website i'm making but i'm going to go with this one right here the grow big and another thing to keep in mind is on the bottom it shows what the original price is this is a discounted price right now so it's going to be for what a year or whatever amount of time you get that for but eventually the plan will go back to the standard price so looking at that the next step we have now that we chose our plan is to actually choose our domain and remember i said the domain is essentially going to be what someone types in on the top on their search bar on their little address bar to navigate to your website so siteground.com is the domain for this site and then we're going to make one i'm going to call it central surf shop uh central surf shop type that wrong surf and you can actually if you already have a domain you can go and connect one right here but i find it's easiest to just buy it directly through siteground so that's what i'm going to do in this video but again www.santralsurfshop.com of course if you want something else.blog.online whatever something like that plenty and plenty of options there but i'm going to proceed with this one and see if it is available of course not every domain is available if you wanted to be like amazon.com you're out of luck now looking at this the next thing we have to do is actually create our account so we're going to need an email and a password i highly recommend you use a secure email so an email that you don't just throw around everywhere with a with a terrible password you want to make sure you have a good password on your email and then here you want to make a good password for this as well and of course the reason for that is your website is being hosted on siteground and while siteground is very secure and there are two factor options if somebody knows your password then that's going to be a compromise on your part so you want to make sure you're picking a good password in the first place now other than that we're going to have some information down here our address looks like we have a special discount i'm going to say yes let's get that discount and of course it'll ask for information about us like i said our card number and some other information on the bottom so for now i'm actually just going to fill out this information on the top and then we'll revisit in a second once we get down to the purchase information okay so now we've typed in our information we're down in the purchase section and you can see we have a couple options first of all the period that we're choosing you'll see that so we have a really good deal with 12 months it says best deal which is correct and we're looking at eight dollars per month if we go to one month you see it's 30 a month so that's really not worth it 24 months it's 15 a month so you're getting a decent deal but really your best deal here is with 12 months so i highly recommend if you're getting this i mean it only makes sense to get the best deal available then below that we have some extra services the first one is domain registration which we already chose by requesting a domain if you brought your own that obviously wouldn't charge you for that but it's only 18 a year pretty cheap for a domain but of course if you're looking to really save money you can go to something like name cheap or something else and and you can get a domain elsewhere just keep that in mind but again a lot of times it is easier to just go directly through siteground below that we have domain privacy it's something i highly recommend you get domain privacy as it says right there hides your personal details from third parties so i'm very important to me at least and then of course we have sg site scanner that's something i'm going to skip out on for now but it's something you might want to consider getting and one other thing i realized i should have mentioned this earlier in the video there are speed controls on youtube's video player so i know sometimes i tend to move rather quickly or for some people maybe i move too slow and whatever the situation is you can go down i think it's like the little gear icon on one side and you'll be able to change the playback speed to go double one half whatever it might be and adjust it according to your needs to make sure that i'm moving at the correct pace for you now going down we have to say i understand i confirm i don't want special offers and we're going to say pay now and just like that we now have a website and we're ready to go to the next step so if we go to proceed to customer area the little button on the bottom there okay that brings us into the siteground dashboard and you can see there's a lot going on here but you don't have to worry because most of it is just to make things easy like all of these down here are just little walk throughs for some common things people might want to do like transfer domain create an email account all types of stuff like that it does try to make it as easy as possible and we are going to install wordpress in a second but i want to kind of familiarize you with this dashboard just in case you have to come back here in the future because there are some fundamental tools here so one of them is websites if you have multiple websites you'll see all of those will show up here similarly if you want to make a new website you could just go and add a new site we also have services and this is going to be your hosting and your domain if you want to change your plans or cancel your plans or change the pricing whatever you want to do you can do all of that directly through here the billing information is over there because these will auto renew if you don't tell them otherwise and we can go to referrals if you have friends and you want to invite them you could get a little bit of free hosting out of this now going back to the home page the obvious next step is to actually install wordpress as it says right on the top and this is a nice little installation wizard it's going to walk us through there and make it very easy so if we just click set up site it's going to bring us over here so we can start a new site or we can migrate the site we are going to start a brand new website so starting a new site and we can choose if we want wordpress wordpress with woocommerce or a weebly site builder we are going to use woocommerce but i want to show you guys how to actually install that directly from wordpress so you could choose either one it doesn't matter this will actually save you a step or two but i'm just going to select just wordpress for now and we are going to create a new login so i could generate a password is probably what i'm going to do honestly so let's copy this copy my password and we need an email address to sign in and then for the wordpress login you'll need an email address and a password this can be a different password from your siteground login and again this is something that you want to make sure it is a very secure password and that you definitely do not forget this because if you forget it it'll be very hard to get back into your website and just trust me it saves a lot of time if you don't forget this so i will then click continue and it's going to start installing it actually one last thing it's going to ask if we want to add any extras again i don't want the site scanner right now i do want domain privacy i must have accidentally deselected that before i completed the purchase but let's just go and pay now for this one so i do have domain privacy on here and then that will actually go to the next step and it'll be installing and creating our website okay so just like that we're all set and ready to go and that's pretty much everything we want to do on siteground so the next step we already have domain and hosting the next step is to go to wordpress and the way to do this is actually very easy you'll just type in your domain so central surf shop wp dash admin so this is going to bring you to a little login page for wordpress and this is where like i said you need to remember that username and that password so i'm going to type in my email it's mike santralmedia.com and then put that password in there i'm going to say remember me and we will say login and this one here looks a little bit different than it will in the future because this is like your welcome page the first time you're doing this in the future it'll just jump right into your wordpress dashboard which you'll see what that looks like in a second so i'm going to click on start now it's going to ask me if we want a theme i'm going to skip all of this right now i really don't want to choose a theme yet so if we go to the bottom it'll actually have it'll have the option to skip or we'll go to exit and that'll get us out of this little this little welcome thing right here okay so this is a dashboard and like i said every time you log in from your domain.com wp-admin it will take you to this in the future and really this is where everything is going to happen from now on everything we've done up to this point is really a one-time thing but here is going to be somewhere that you come back to a lot okay so now that we're on the dashboard right here you can see on the left side we have quite a few different options we're gonna go through those throughout this video but really the first thing we want to do is set up a theme so picking a theme we want to do is go down to appearance on the left side and if you just hover over that you can see themes so go over and click on themes and by default your website does come with some themes it comes with four different or three different ones right here and you definitely could use these if you wanted to although there are many other themes out there so there's really no reason to feel stuck with these so i'm going to go up to the top and say add new so add now you can see you can upload a theme if you if you purchased one somewhere else on some other site or you can just look through this library here and there are tons of free ones as well as paid ones you can choose from so if i go to astra astra is a very popular one type in astra and you can see right there this is a free one that we can install of course you could preview it if you click on details and preview and it'll show you a lot about what it'll look like they'll tell you about how it works how things are structured and things like that so if i just hit the little x button here i can go and say install so on the bottom we'll click the little blue button it installs takes about a second to do that and then you have to make sure you don't forget this step you go and click activate otherwise you have astra but it's not being used so once you activate it you'll see it'll kick you back to the themes page and now this is the one that is active we still have the other themes but they're not being used on our website so because this is now the active one so at this point we can actually go into a new tab and go to our website and you'll see that we have something there it's not just a white page and there is some structure you can see you have a bit of a header on the top a little column on the right side but it's far from what we want and rather than building this from scratch which would take a really a massive amount of time it's a lot easier if we start from a template and so in order to do that i'm going to close out of this tab and you'll see if we go on the left side down to astra options you'll be able to go on the right side here and you can install importer plugin now this is going to allow you to install a total basically an entire website with some dummy images and dummy text that you can then replace and it just saves you a lot of time and a lot of structuring for your website so if we go and install that importer template or a plugin rather it'll take a second it'll activate it and it'll bring you to this page right here all right now here you'll see that we have four different options which brings us to the next phase of this video so when you're actually building a website on wordpress of course you have a theme but another thing you have is actually a builder which makes it very easy to essentially drag and drop elements onto your website so this is really what makes it very very easy to make a website and while all of these are very capable options like beaver builder gutenberg if you want to use those go ahead and use them but in this video we are using elementor i've actually made a full tutorial on this in the past we're going to cover some of the basics in this video but the good news is at the end of this video if there's anything more advanced you want to learn about how to use elementor i'll put a link in the description below and you guys can head over and see that full tutorial but with that being said i'll definitely show you everything you'll need to know in this video but you can see right here it brings us to a big library of different elementor related plug or themes templates rather that we can use now if you go down you'll see that really all of these look pretty great they're really well built already and they require very little customization other than just like add your own text add your own images but of course you want to keep in mind which one is going to make the most sense for your brand what's the right essentially feel of your website you don't have to worry so much about the images because they're easy to replace but of course the fonts and overall style would be very different so for example this one right here the oldest bar in london that theme might not be the best if you're doing a surf shop so it's generally easier if you find something that's a little bit more similar to what you're trying to do and so let's scroll down and see if we find anything even remotely similar to outdoor sports or a surf shop another thing to note is on the top if you click the little thing that says all little drop down you can choose a couple things so i chose free and we're only going to look at free ones right now although there are some great premium ones that i highly recommend checking out but we can also go to e-commerce so we want free we want e-commerce that's really the goal of what we're looking for here and you can see that the structures here definitely make a lot more sense for what we're trying to do as a surf shop so i'm actually just going to go with this one right here this little organic store is what it's called and it looks like a pretty basic really simple website so we're going to click on this and it'll show you what the different pages look like the about us get in touch and if we like this we can go and import the complete site so that's exactly what i'm going to do right now import complete site and it's going to say i'm on wordpress it's going to ask us some questions i'm building a website for myself we're going to say next [Music] so now it's going to take a few minutes to import this theme but it gives us a huge head start when we're actually making the website okay and just like that it's ready to go we can then close this out and in a new tab let's go back to our website so if we go to our site now it should be showing something much better so now look at that we already have a full-blown website right here it's obviously an organic store so not exactly what we wanted but it's giving us a really nice design and it'll save us so much time to not have to create these little boxes and icons and text and and everything is just already in the right location so with that being said we're ready to move on to the next step okay so if we go back to our dashboard on wordpress you'll see that the left side looks a little bit different now we're now seeing products and analytics and marketing and woocommerce and cart flows and a lot of other stuff so that little process right there of of getting the theme that was e-commerce related it really made sense because it was bringing a lot of things together that we otherwise would have had to get anyway so we would have had to get elementor we would have had to get woocommerce and if we go down here to plugins you'll see that it's going to show that a lot of the plugins that we were going to get anyway are already here so they imported woocommerce we already got elementor right there and so that's going to save us time that we didn't have to go and do those separately but if you chose a different template if you chose one that didn't come with woocommerce what you would do is actually go down to plugins as we are right here and on the top you'll say add new plugin so we're going to add a new plugin you can then search for woocommerce so you can go search for woocommerce and want to say enter and you'll see that woocommerce is right there it's what we already have it's already active but if it's not for you you can go and install that and then click activate to make sure that you actually have that and it's being used all right so we're making some really good progress we already have a domain we already have a website we have a theme we have a builder we have pretty much everything we need and now all that's left is to understand the tools we have and actually go through the customization process of adding your own text and adding your own images which is really the next step so starting off on the wordpress dashboard i want to walk you through some of the tools we have so you better understand where things are and this can become a little bit less intimidating so starting off on the top left side you can see my dashboard and in your dashboard you have home which is just your basic dashboard which gives you a couple options that you really won't be spending a whole lot of time here then we have updates and this is something you want to check periodically as your website goes through time you want to make sure that you're going through here and updating your plugins updating your themes to make sure that you have the most recent version of everything to make sure everything works well together so you have no security issues there's a lot of reasons why you want to keep your website up to date but this is where you'd be doing that then going down we have posts now post is going to essentially be any type of blog article if you want to make an article about literally anything if we're doing a surf website right here we could do how to surf we can make them about how to take care of your surfboard how to install fins how to wear a leash it doesn't matter what it is you can add any blog you want and it's very easy to do and manage them from right here as you start to get more and more blog posts you'll see that they'll show up here as a list and it's another great way to kind of manage them and make sure that they're up to date you can go and sort by date or author and see really a lot of information in a really compact space here we'll talk about how to actually create a blog blog post later on in this video you just go to add new and i'll show you exactly how to construct that later but we also have categories and tags now categories are very important when you make a blog post it's going to by default be labeled as uncategorized and so adding a category does help to manage your menus and things like that it really is useful so again we'll talk about that later on but just keep in mind that post right here is where you would go to actually manage that then we have media you really don't have to spend much time here but this is where it might be easier just to bulk upload all of the images you have your logo and any photos you have that you know you're going to use on your website and sometimes it's easier just to upload those right here otherwise we'll upload them when we need them later on in the video pages is a very important one and this is one that you want to look at by default it gave us a lot of pages it gave us some that maybe we don't care about so if we go through this you'll see that we have like my account privacy policy sample page shop contact and like some of these are very important obviously we need a cart page but let's just say we don't want a privacy policy maybe instead we'll make that or include that in a different page if you want to delete any page on here we can just select that and we can go to trash it'll move it to the trash can and then we can empty our trashcan later on and we don't have to worry about that page anymore so now that page is gone we can also add new pages which i will show you in a second this one is very important and we'll talk about how to actually build them with elementor but continuing on with the tools comments is going to be essentially any blog post you have if you enable comments on like the bottom similar to a youtube video really people can leave comments and every now and then comments are going to be spam sometimes they're not real people they're just like internet trolls or there's some kind of bot and you can go through and manage those here and really filter them out and mark them as spam and it's a good way to manage the contents without or the comments without having to go to each individual article we have card floats right here which may not be necessary but i'm going to keep it anyway this is a plugin that came when we got the theme integrates with woocommerce and it gives us apparently a better checkout experience so we'll check that out later on in this video and then we can go down to woocommerce now woocommerce is really we're going to be spending a lot of time in this video and i'm sorry i didn't mean to click around twice like that this is where we can add products we can manage products we can manage sales track inventory do some marketing stuff a lot of stuff like that is going to be done right in here and this is really going to be the next step before we start adding those pages before we add blog posts i want to make sure that we have all of our our products and everything organized as well as possible and so you see the next couple things are related to woocommerce with products analytics and marketing but then i just want to touch on the other ones really quickly before we get back into woocommerce you can see the elementor settings are right here if you ever want to upgrade to elementor pro you can do that down here and it does give you quite a few benefits as well with some more little items you can drag and drop onto your page and more custom customization and more freedom that you can do i have elementor pro on quite a few other websites of mine and i do recommend it but of course it's certainly not necessary it's free to start it's free to use forever if you want to and you know it's just there if you ever want to upgrade it it'd be very easy to do here we can go down to templates and this is going to be essentially if you have a blog post and you consistently use a very similar style on there it saves you a lot of time if you make a template and then you apply that to the blog post that way anytime you make a post it's going to by default just use the title up here the author here maybe the featured image above that you can include all kinds of things like that a disclaimer on all of them it's a really great way to save time especially if you plan on making a lot of posts you can use templates for other things as well but blog posts is really what i think is the most common and most practical use from my experience we have themes we've right here we have appearance which has themes has customization some widgets the menus so the navigation menu on the top all of that will customize later on in the video and of course i already showed you where plugins were but the other ones of course we have users there and users is going to allow you to add other team members or other employees of yours that you can then give access and there are several different ways you can add access so right now i'm an administrator by default you are too when you make a website but you can add several different roles and i'll put a link below if you guys want to know the different roles but you can add editors contributors authors um some like subscribers i believe another one is just like a moderator like a lot of different roles that you can you can assign to people that give them different access to different tools so some of them can only write some of them can upload images some you know all types of stuff like that like i said i'll leave more information about that down below in case you guys have a team and of course we have tools settings and some other little security options on the bottom so that's everything on the left side obviously a lot of functionality and we're going to go through these one at a time in order with really what makes sense as we're building this online store so really the next step is to go into woocommerce and we want to start building this store and adding our products in here so from here if we just go down to products we can see that we have by default a lot of products the ones that came with this theme and i don't want any of these so i'm going to select all of these products and we could just go and delete all of them so i can go to bulk actions we can move them to trash and say apply and this will get rid of all the products that are on the website right now which i highly recommend you do so you don't accidentally end up selling hand-picked red chili peppers if that's not what you actually have for sale okay so the next thing we want to do is actually to start adding products to this website and so you can see on the left side the obvious place to go is going to be in products and of course we have a couple options there but if we just click on products it'll bring us to this page right here and we'll be able to add new products so right there i'm going to click add new and the good thing is as i mentioned in the beginning of this video there are many different types of products you can add so i'm going to talk about six different types of products you can add on here and of course each one has really limitless possibilities so you can really make anything you want and sell almost any style of product on here from digital products to you know as you can see right down here group products affiliate products variable products and i'll explain what all of those mean in just a second but we're going to start off with the first one the simple product which is the default there right away and a simple product is the easiest to understand that's going to be essentially anytime you want to sell an individual item if you just want to sell and of course you can have multiple quantities of that but i just mean a product that doesn't have any variations it's a physical product you're going to ship it so for example if you want to sell like a surfboard leash or if you want to sell like surf wax i think that's the example i'm going to use right here so as we're a surf shop i'm going to say surf wax or surfboard wax and so here we can have the title and the title i would recommend making it a little bit longer than this but keep in mind that whatever you make it's going to make that the default permalink and we can actually edit that as well so if i want to say surf wax so like a surfboard wax and i'm going to say maybe this is like a couple ounces like medium size medium sized stick and then you can see right here we can edit what the permalink actually is now the permalink is you want that to be short concise easy to read so that somebody can identify what the site is that they're on as well as you know make it very easily shareable easy to index for google keeping it nice and short like this is really a good way to do that so now we have a title of the product we have a permalink and now we can go down here and add essentially our whole description now i'm just going to paste some latin dummy text here but keep in mind that within this description you can make some different things bold you can make things italic you can do whatever you want so the normal hotkeys work there you also have these tools right up here as well and so this is something it's a very similar editor to what you see on maybe say ebay for example and so you're able to add a lot to this it doesn't have to just be plain text and i really recommend going through this and if you want to add some little headers in there some different stuff like that so maybe like heading four uh so maybe like warranty you can add all types of stuff on here and really do whatever you want but for the purposes of this video i'm not going to spend time really filling this out because there's just so many different things you might want to put there i'll let you guys do that on your own but like i said keep in mind you have a lot of tools here so make this look however you'd like it to look as we go down you can see that we can start customizing the product itself so as i said we have multiple options for the product type we are sticking with a simple product this is not virtual this is not downloadable we'll talk about those in just a second but we have a lot of options on the left side here so starting off with the price the regular price for this wax let's just say normally it's uh maybe like 11.99 and then you can have a sale as well so a lot of times people do this to kind of incentivize a purchase or make people feel better about what they're buying so maybe instead of 11.99 we can sell it for 9.99 or you can actually do this as a scheduled promotion so if you want this to happen for the next maybe four or five months you can very easily say maybe starting in a couple days we'll list that and then we'll end that in october so now we have a scheduled sale just keep in mind when it ends you're gonna have to come back and actually update that if you want to go back on sale otherwise it'll be going right back to that regular price we can then go down to inventory and this is going to allow us to create a stock keeping unit if you're not selling many items you might not care as much about this but as you start to sell more and more products it's really generally considered best practice to have skus um i mean pretty much every company i've ever worked with has had one so we're going to make one for this product right here we're going to call it like maybe 1001 and now we can also enable uh stock management as well so we can choose how many what quantity we have and and if you have other software to do this then you obviously won't need this right here and you can deselect that but i'm just going to say we have maybe like 500 of these and once we sell out we could say we don't want to allow back orders maybe you have a long lead time on your orders and you don't want back orders to build up and have disappointed customers or you could allow them to build up but just notify the customer that hey like we're back ordered i'll get them to you soon but just keep in mind it might be like a month or two right so allowing would make sense if you have like a really quick turnaround but really i think i'm going to leave this on don't allow also low stock threshold we could say that we have a store-wide threshold that we can set somewhere else or you can set your own and say like notify me whenever it gets to a certain amount so whenever we get to uh like five that's the threshold of low stock and you are notified then we can go down here enable this only to allow uh okay if you want to only allow one of this per order and that's if you have some type of limitation so for example in the united states right now a lot of companies have a limitation on like ammunition because there's a shortage of that so it makes sense that in some situations you want to limit how many can be purchased so we don't really care how many of our surfboard wax you purchase so i'm going to leave that unchecked then we can go down to shipping now this one i highly recommend you do a little bit of research i assume most people probably already did if they're selling stuff and you want to know with what you know who you're going to ship with whether that's like dhl or ups or fedex or whatever company it might be you want to know who it's going to be you want to know what the classes are you can ship with and you want to know like how much your product is actually going to weigh and what box it's going to fit in but for the purposes of this we're just going to say it weighs like 0.2 a quarter pound and right now it says kilograms we're going to switch over to pounds as the u.s units in a second but type it in as if it were pounds right now don't worry about the units and i'll go and change the units in just a minute now as far as the dimensions go let's just say maybe this is like two inch this is like four inches by four inches by two inches that's a relatively small box and again it says centimeters don't worry about that we will be working in inches in just a second now shipping class i'm just going to ignore that for now we didn't actually configure that yet but we're going to be continuing down here linked products would be essentially if you have another product that you want to upsell or cross-sell essentially show next to this one as like a suggestion for somebody to buy so being that this is uh surfboard wax maybe you have like a nice little container to hold the wax or maybe you have some type of accessory to grip the wax so it doesn't get on your hands i don't know what it might be but if you have another product you could list that here because this is the first product on the site we can't do that right now we can come back later and do that if we want but for now i'm going to skip this and we will talk about this a little bit later on in the video going down to attributes this one is not especially important here because this is a simple product if you wanted to add any attributes say like we have like color or scent maybe i don't know we could add one let's just say it's like scent and we might have like raspberry lime and i don't know maybe like orange i don't know just something like that and so we could we could save that right we could save that but that's not really going to provide us a whole lot of value because it is a simple product and we're not really looking to have different variations but i just want to show you guys that's where you would add those attributes and of course we can't actually use those right now we don't have variations on here because like i said it is a simple product so instead i'm going to just remove those attributes we don't actually need those right now but i'm just showing you guys essentially what that is in case you were wondering as we get onto advanced you can have some purchase note right there menu order and you can enable or disable reviews if for some reason you don't want reviews on your website you could very easily remove that we can go down to cart flows this is what i said before was that little plug-in so i'm actually not going to worry about that right now and we also have some other options down here as well if you want to learn more about any one of these so like a one-page checkout additional variation images stuff like that you can go into any one of those um add some other extensions i'm not going to again again i'm not going to talk about those in this video now we can go down to the product short description so up here we have essentially the longer description we can have a little short description down here i'm just going to take like maybe like a one sentence right there and we can go down and keep that as the shorter one okay and then so now that we have our short description again you'll notice that we don't have any images of the product yet and the product obviously needs images that's very important to sell anything and you'll see on the right side we have quite a few more options as well so we'll kind of work from the bottom up here product gallery of course if you have multiple images you can start adding them here i currently only have one image for each product for the example in this video so i'm just going to set a product image right there i already uploaded that here so you can see our little surf wax we're going to select that and we're going to set the product image so that's the product image right now and of course you could update that or edit that however you want and i'm not going to change anything on that right now then we can go to astra settings if you're using a different theme obviously the theme name will appear here or possibly not depending on the theme you're using but for astra we have these settings right here so when you're looking at the product you can customize like where the sidebar is you can have all types of things let's deselect that you can disable things like the primary header you can disable the title if you want you can disable a footer you can do all types of different things down here and again once you start seeing the product on the page you'll start to want to customize that a little bit more but for now we're going to skip over that and touch on how the website actually looks later on in the video and then here we have product tags this is really going to be more important for finding similar products on your site or if you have any search functionality and you want to have like a little search bar to find different products that would be relevant here so for best practice purposes i usually just add it anyway i usually add a cup at least a couple so we could say like wax surf wax um and then maybe surf wax is one word if somebody did that and of course maybe a brand or whatever and you separate them all with commas we're going to say add it adds those three little tags and then up here we can go and we'll see categories now the category is groceries and juice remember that the theme we were using originally or the template rather did have some sample products we are not using those sample products so instead we want to go and add our own category so for this one we're going to say surf accessories and that is going to be the category we don't want a parent category but you could make this a subcategory of something and we're going to say yes we're ready to add that new category and then lastly you can see up here that we have a couple options about the visibility so it's ready to be published it'll be it'll be public and right now it is a draft but we are ready as soon as we click publish it will be a public published product right here but we could also enable or disable the catalog visibility and that only makes sense for a group product we'll talk about that later on in the video but for now i'm just going to say publish and that is our first product it is a simple product and it's ready to go so we can go and actually view the product as soon as it's done being published right now it is still publishing but we can go up there and say view product and it'll bring us right over here to see what it actually looks like so there you go just like that it actually was it's incredibly easy uh just by adding the information right there we now have a really nice looking page where we can zoom in on the product you see the title of it right there you see the price uh of course right now it is not on sale because remember we did that on a schedule but starting in like i think two or three days you will be seeing that listed as 9.99 of course there's our little short description and then down here our longer description additional information also shows like the weight and the dimensions and of course we can see the reviews since we did enable reviews on here so that's pretty much everything you'll need to see on the individual simple product page now we can actually go back and start adding some different products because honestly not everything is going to be this straightforward so for example if you want to sell something like t-shirts or a wetsuit or something that has multiple sizes we're going to want to use a different style so let's go back to where we were so just click on back it'll take us back here and we can actually start adding a new product so if we go to add new on the left side we'll add a new product and our new product let's say that this time instead of using a simple product we may instead want to use a variable product so down here a variable product is like i said going to allow allow you to have some other options in there so for this one let's just say it is a surf leash surfboard leash and so for anyone who doesn't know about surfboarding this is like the little rope essentially that goes from your ankle to the surfboard to make sure that if you fall the surfboard doesn't go away from you and you can just pull it back from your ankle and so again we're going to paste some little some little text down here as our description uh really nothing special there uh we can see that right here our surfboard leash is you know are already making that permalink so that looks good as well we can go down here and start adding a stop a stock keeping unit so we're going to call this one ten thousand two uh we can manage it down here we can say that we have quantities of maybe uh like the 200 of these we don't want to allow back orders regular threshold everything's ready to go uh shipping blah blah we're gonna go through all this stuff one by one so shipping let's just say that again this is uh maybe like one pound uh and we want it to be a very small box maybe it's gonna be like four by four by four and we can go to linked products again we don't want any linked products maybe you know what maybe we do want to have an upsell or a cross cell so let's just look up what we had before so if we said surf wax surf wax right there we can have that as a cross cell and so when i actually publish this you guys will see exactly what i'm talking about when i say cross-sell and what that looks like we can then go down to attributes and this is where we start to have the benefits of a variable product so the first attribute we might want to add would maybe be let's just say we want to have like the length so we could say length and we could have a couple different lengths of this we could say maybe somebody wants like a little four foot leash maybe we want a five foot leash six full leash uh and we'll just do like a couple different sizes i mean i don't know any yeah that looks fine to me and we can also select this little box right here use for variation so because this is a variable product we want to have variations of it and so these attributes are going to be more than just plain attributes they're actually going to be the variations that we will be using so we're going to save the attributes now and you'll see in the very next one variations we have we can go and add variations and we can add create variations from all attributes so a little drop down menu and then say go and it's going to say we're going to say okay and it's going to create four or i believe five different variations there oh and it looks like we accidentally made those all one variation so if we go back to attributes i believe i read the instructions incorrectly you're supposed to be using the little separation bar instead of a comma so instead i'm going to use this little separation bar so we have four feet five feet we've got six feet and seven feet and of course eight feet as well so i actually removed and just re-added all of them because like i said i forgot the attributes little separation bar i used a comma instead uh so i removed them and then i just re-added like i said to just import all of them as we did up here um and so now that we have the five different variations we can actually go in and customize each individual one of those and so when i say customize you can really change a lot about this so if we click on the little expand button on the right side you can see that we have a stock keeping unit we can add we can have an image for them a regular price a sale price again you can schedule the sale price for individual ones you can change the weight the dimensions the shipping class and of course the description as well and you can do that for all of these as well and of course if you have and we'll get into this in a second if you have another type of attribute besides just size maybe if you have color or something like that you can have a massive permutation of different attributes as you can see right here different variations rather and so we'll get into that in just a second but let's start off with these five different variations just being the length and i'm going to start to populate this so we're going to start off the stock keeping unit let's say this is 1003 1003 it is enabled you could disable this if you wanted to and we're not actually going to manage stock but you could you know very easily just click that and manage the stock of this as well we're going to add a price so let's say this is 12.99 but it's on sale right now for 11.99 uh the weight i'm just going to start i'm just going to add ones here because it doesn't actually matter right now of course it does matter for your actual product but i mean for this tutorial it's not especially important and then of course we can have some dummy text right here for the description and so i'm just going to copy that and paste it a few times and so that's everything for the first variation we're going to upload an image to make sure that people can see what it is that they're trying to buy so let's go and upload an image right now and i believe i have a surf leash right there variable length surf leash and i'm going to use the same image over and over it's not recommended of course because different attributes you want to use different images that actually relate to what the product is but again because this is just a tutorial i'll be reusing that image right there so then we can go and collapse this so we're good on this one we're going to then click the little expand button and now let's go down to the next one now i'm going to do all this right now so just give me like maybe 5-10 seconds and i will have all of these ready to go all right so we now have all the different variations down here we can then add the product short description so just like something a little simple like that like i said and maybe in here we want to add a link to centralmedia.com right so something simple like that we're going to add a link and then we can go over here and set the product image of course we already set the variation images so if you didn't want individual variation images you could instead just use the single product image as you see over here and of course you can see the product gallery as we had before and a lot of the same settings on the right side we can add tags here so this is going to be surf leash there we go and we're going to add those and then we're ready to go we can actually add that to surf accessories and say publish so we now have our second product pretty much ready to go and as we go and view this product you'll see that the variations really pop up in a very convenient way it's one of the reasons that i really like using woocommerce with the astra theme like it really works together very very well in my opinion so if we go and view the product you can see here that we have the surf leash right there you can then have a drop down to choose the option or the length and with each one you'll see our little description there of course i made that way too long but it tells you how many are in stock it tells you the price and you can see that we have a difference in price on the top it's going to show you the entire variety so i think one of them i made like two two dollars and 85 cents the other one i made 220 so let's say i think this one was really expensive no this is 220 and then this one is 2.85 so you can make different prices for different variations and of course depending on how expensive things are to buy for you and what the margins are going to be and depending on how rare or whatever things are going to be how hard they are to ship you can very easily change the price accordingly and i think that's a really nice feature to have so variable product that's a really simple way to make a variable product now if we want to say that instead we want to make let's make another variable product but add a little bit more than just one attribute so if i click the back button it should take me back to where the products were where we were editing that product and again i'm going to say add a new product and now let's say instead of something that just has one dimension so for example the surf leash with the length now we want to sell a wetsuit and let's say the wetsuit has a couple different sizes and options and maybe different colors so let's actually go and do that right now so we can go down to attributes and we want to say we want to add a new one so let's add a new attribute and this one's going to be size and size is going to be small and remember you want to use the little vertical separator medium large extra large right so there's there's one set of attributes we can save that now we can have the second one might be like fit so this one could be fit and so here we could have regular we could have tall we could have plus and you can add whatever whatever else you want as well so i'm going to save that and let's say lastly the other one we want to add would be maybe color so we want to add so let's say color and here we can have black we can have blue and maybe we have a white wetsuit as well okay so now we want to make sure that we're selecting variable product we have our different attributes and you want to make sure that on each one you go and select use for variations don't forget to do that and once we have that we can go down to variations and create our little permutation of we have three three and four so we're gonna have a lot of different variations here uh looking at probably around 36 different ones so if we go first let's say save attributes then we can go to variations and again you want to select from the drop down create variations from all attributes so i'm going to say go and we're going to say okay on the top and it's going to take a second until it makes all of these i'm not going to add different prices to each individual one i'm just going to make sure that they're all like the same price i'm not going to add different images but again this is something that you probably do want to do you want to make sure that things are are really fleshed out but it does take a lot of time and so for the purposes of this tutorial i'm going to save you guys from that i'm not going to go and put all that in but just understand that that is how you'd go about doing that now of course we also have our short description it looks like it's really taking a while to make this little permutation here so let's just give it a second and there we go 36 variations have been added so let's say okay and you can see here we have all the different variations here of small regular black and so we could say maybe we want to kind of bundle everything we just say any color any fit anytime it's small essentially you want to say that when it is small the regular price is going to be like 25 so we're going to say 25 25 and then down here we can say anytime it is a medium and it doesn't matter the fit it doesn't matter the color uh then we can go down here and make a different price so we can say anytime it's a medium the price is going to be 28 this is actually incredibly cheap for a wetsuit maybe you should make it 128 and 125 dollars i i don't know and don't take any of this stuff as as real this is all just an example of course um but as we go down let's do the same thing for large so anytime is large uh it doesn't matter the fit doesn't matter the color we want to make sure that they are 100 but maybe they're on sale only this one's on sale and we can make it for 138 dollars and then lastly we have the extra large and we're going to add extra large and this would be any fit any color and we can say that anytime this is true it's going to be 148 so now we can go down and actually save our variation so save and we'll be ready to go then so we have all our variations they're being saved hopefully we don't have any issues with that it'll give us a little message if we do it looks like we're ready to go um and so 32 variations do not have prices um that's just what it says right now but we'll actually go in and we should be able to see the prices now going down here we can add our short description like i said i don't want to add you know too many details to all the different variations but we can add our short description to leave it something like that we can set product image as well so now let's go and upload a file again this is just like the general image you want to have this image if i was actually doing a store and i was selling wetsuits i think in this image i would like to show at least at the very least all the different colors in one image rather than just one but again because i don't actually sell these things i'm just going to use a picture of a single wetsuit and that's going to get the job done for us right now so that's pretty much everything i want to see right here of course i didn't flush out all the other information you guys can definitely do that on your own time but really just demonstrating all the different variations here let's go and publish this product and see what it actually looks like when we go to view the product so it's going to take a second to publish that now we can go to view this product this is the wetsuit and here you can see that we have from 125 to 148 dollars we can choose the options we want so a small regular uh black one uh it's going to be 125 dollars so see it was lying when it said before that we didn't have prices for all of them we already do have prices for all of them uh that was just a little glitch in the software i believe because like i said we said anytime it's small doesn't matter the fit doesn't matter the color 125 dollars now if we say it's like extra large 148 and of course like i said you don't have to set the price purely based on size you could say for example anytime it's extra large and it is a plus size maybe that costs a little bit more to make a little bit more material there you could make that a higher price if you wanted to but that's all stuff that you can customize on the back end again very very powerful with wordpress woocommerce and astra really makes it a very easy and very powerful to sell all types of different products all types of different variations and really do whatever you want so it's all that's again i i i keep saying this but it is very exciting and i like just talking about this in general because it is such a powerful software and it's amazing that it's so accessible and free to use so i'm gonna click the back button so far we've gone through a simple product and two different types of variable products with a simple one or we could do a variable product where we have tons of different layers of attributes and so now let's go and talk about a different style of product altogether so rather than just the simple product or the variable product let's say that it's not a product you're actually going to be able to ship maybe instead it's going to be something somebody else ships for example an external or affiliate product so this is a great way to essentially i see this most with creators anybody who is an influencer a creator a blog any anything like that it's very likely that you'll be using affiliate links or affiliate products at least somewhere throughout your journey and so it's nice that you can list them rather than just like a little link to click or a banner or something like that it's really nice that you can list it as a product on a store that then redirects people over to another site so this would be a great way if i have an actual surf shop and let's just say there's some software that i don't sell but i know another company does sell it and i can get an affiliate link with them then maybe i want to list this on my site and this link will be an affiliate link it'll send the the customer over to the store for the other brand and then i will get a commission if they make that purchase so it's something that of course is not for everybody not every store or online site in general is going to use this but if you know a lot about affiliate links and affiliate products this is a very exciting thing to have so let's do an example right here let's just say if we go to amazon and we find like a surf let's just type in surf and see what we see something maybe a surfboard uh um a trainer yeah maybe a trainer's a good idea so right here is going to be a servant paddleboard trainer it's not something that i plan to sell on this site i'm just going to copy the link here of course what you'd actually want to do is have an affiliate link this is clearly not an affiliate link this is just the regular link to get to this product but i'm just going to copy it and use it for demonstration purposes so we can go and paste the product url we can have the buttons say buy product or it can say um like buy product on amazon so buy product on amazon i usually like that better so it tells people where they're going to be redirected we can tell them what the regular price was what was the price on that one it looks like 170 dollars so 169.95 sorry turned off num lock uh 169.95 and it doesn't have a sale price right now but we can add again if we want to add an image down here and i highly recommend you do all this stuff so let's just say for now maybe we want to like copy a little bit of text from here and of course depending on what your affiliate product is you really want to talk with whoever the seller is to make sure that they're okay with you doing this in most situations people are because it's free traffic for them but you know you want to talk with whoever the affiliate host is whoever the actual seller is to make sure you're not breaking any rules now you can go down and check the inventory really doesn't matter here of course because it is an affiliate product you can have linked products and upsells so again if we want to upsell a product that we already have so let's just say maybe we want to upsell like a surf leash for example or like maybe a 5 foot surf leash we can upsell that right here we can go down and check out some attributes which aren't really relevant for this product the advanced stuff are not not relevant not really relevant and so that's pretty much everything you want to see with this one it's really simple and straightforward you can add some tags and do everything we do on the right side so let's say like trainer and maybe maybe we want to add this to so let's say add and we want to add this to surf accessories category on our website and then lastly we do want a product image i don't have an image for this one so instead we're just going to use let's just use this image for now it really doesn't matter you guys will get the idea and so then we can actually go and publish this product as well so the good thing is affiliate products i actually didn't add any description there let's add that but the good thing is affiliate products are are really easy to use um and they're something that i highly recommend to certain brands but like i said not every brand is going to use this and so let's take a look at what it looks like but let's first actually go and say surfboard surfboard trainer we're going to add some some description text right there this down here was a short description so i didn't actually mean to add quite that much text and now let's go up here and update that so we click on update so you'll notice that it already says it's published it's public it's ready to see we can actually go and update that you want to make sure you don't forget to click that whenever you make changes and now we can actually go and view the product i'm actually going to hold ctrl and click it does make it a little easier because it opens it in a new tab and so you can hear you see right here that it says byproduct on amazon has a little short description we have our image right there and we have our description below so if somebody clicks on that link that would be our affiliate link it'll take them right to amazon really a cool feature if you were going to build this from scratch it would be a little bit more cumbersome to do and so again very very easy very convenient and a lot of other competitors out there don't make it nearly as easy to do affiliate stuff on there so for example something like shopify like you can set up some affiliates but it's a little bit trickier to do it's not as straightforward as you see with woocommerce and again one of the reasons that this is so versatile so now we have simple product we've got variable product we have variable product that is very complicated and we have an affiliate product and all of those are physical products or you know i guess the yeah all of our physical products really but we could make a digital or a downloadable product or a virtual product and so that's what i'm going to be talking about next okay so let's say next we want to have a digital product something that's downloadable and this could be a pdf this could be like any type of lut file for editing photos it could be a music file it could really be any file you have that you want somebody to download or are going to sell to somebody and they want to download but for the purposes of this example i'm going to say uh it is like for example maybe a song we're going to do a song so let's just say we want this to be surfing jams surfing jams and this can be some music i don't know if anybody actually listens to music while they're surfing i don't really know how you would do that without losing a speaker or phone or whatever but whatever we're just going to say surfing jams and again we have our permalink we've got our description here we have a simple product it is a we selected downloadable now because that'll give you this little field here where we can choose what is downloadable we're going to add a file so we can choose the file name and this is going to be surf jam number one surfjam number one and we can choose a url for the file or we can actually just go i'm going to choose a file right now so we're going to upload a file we're going to select a file and i don't actually have any songs right here so i'm just going to use like this image we're going to pretend that this image is the song but instead we're going to use this image that's going to be the file they download like i said you would actually want to upload an mp3 not a jpeg but you get the idea that's the fire the file url they're going to download there's no limit on how many downloads they have it never expires and we can choose a price for that as well so we're gonna say the price for this one uh it's like a dollar ninety nine uh it's on sale right now um no it's yeah a dollar forty nine maybe let's give it a little sale there we can look inventory obviously there's no limit on this so inventory doesn't make sense there is no shipping so you don't have to worry about this either linking it if you want to have an upsell or cross-sell you can add that and i realize i actually haven't shown you guys where that is so let's let's do a little uh cross sell on this one for uh surf wax maybe see if we have our surf wax there it is so we'll do a cross sell i will show you guys i promise i'll show you guys on this one uh then we can go into attributes no attributes on here and the rest of it you really don't have to talk about it's pretty straightforward you're just going to be downloading an audio file right here as a single song you can add multiple songs if you have multiple files here and that it's all very easy to do and of course the product short descriptions so some jams for surfing and that's going to show up just below the title on your product now we're going to add a product image and the product image is going to be upload the files and it's going to be this one right here which actually is a real album from uh somebody else actually a friend of mine that has a band um it's like yeah so that's why i decided to to use that one so now we can actually go add this to a category we're going to say serve accessories maybe that makes sense here and we're not going to add any tags to this one we're going to say publish and so when we publish this one like i said this one's going to be a little bit different because they're downloading the file when they purchase that and so i'm going to go and view the product and so here you can say that if you want to order like one copy of this it really wouldn't make sense for anyone to order more than one of the mp3 because it is a digital file obviously but we can add that to our cart and when you add to your cart you'll go down here and this is what i said about those upsells uh you can see some other products showing up down here that are related or when you actually go to view the cart you'll see the cross cell there that says you might also be interested in this right here so the surf accessories were always said the cross sell was which when somebody goes to the cart uh you're just kind of offering something that they might be interested in and they could just say yeah let's add that to the cart as well they can click on that add that to the card as well and then when they go over to the cart they have everything in there and again notice that the card experience is really really seamless very easy here we'll talk about adding coupons but other than that it's just a really straightforward way to go about ordering stuff now the the digital file of course like i said you don't have anything really going on here you're not going to have any kind of variations necessarily so it's a little bit more limiting than a physical product or like a variable product but at the same time usually in most situations you're going to be looking for just a basic file and it's easier to make multiple downloadable files or products rather than have some variations on one of course if you want to have variations you could also make it a grouped product as well and we'll talk about grooved product in a second uh but let's next talk about a virtual product now i know virtual product and downloadable product kind of sound similar but virtual product is more along the lines of a service maybe so you can think of that as like maybe like a fiverr gig if it was like i will uh teach you i'll make like a logo for you i'll make a website for you those would be virtual products that there's no deliverable they can download but rather it's like a promise for you to do a service digitally it doesn't even have to be digitally i guess so if we go back to where we were actually click back a couple times until we get to where we were making the product there we go so let's go and add a new product now again we have a lot of different types of products here but let's talk about a virtual product so let's go down select this one right here leave it at simple product and then go say virtual product and maybe this one's just going to be something in person even like for example maybe we want to do surf lessons uh surf lessons um and we could say one one hour surf lesson so one hour of surfing there we go so one hour surf lessons with somebody to teach you uh we can go down and add that to the short description as well and here we can say the price is i don't know maybe like 49 and uh we again we don't have to worry about other things with this one either so we don't have to worry about attributes or inventory or linked products i guess link products if you really want to um so linked product would probably make sense here if you wanted to have two different virtual products so one of them was lessons and the other one was rental then maybe when somebody's getting a rental you would also kind of upsell them or cross-sell them on the lessons as well that'd be a great way to do that but like i said for the purposes of this one we're just going to leave it at this and not do anything other than that maybe it'll include rentals and we can go and upload here you want an image with this you don't obviously need an image but i find that images usually work better when you're trying to you know communicate that you want to give somebody lessons or something like this uh an image really does help to sell your virtual product here so when we go and publish this one again i really didn't flush this out much at all this is very very bare bones here but when we go and actually view the product you'll see that it's going to essentially like promise a one hour surf lesson and you'll get the receipt on the back end here so you'll know who actually ordered that because you're going to add information in the cart but you could also say for example maybe just like bring your receipt with you and that way like we'll know who you are we'll be able to give you the lessons and we'll know that you already paid for it online and so in this situation right here it might actually be a good idea to add a form down here so you can add forms to the bottom so that somebody could actually schedule or if you're doing lessons like this really i think this is a situation where you might want another plug-in uh that would allow people to at least schedule it but you know for for the basics if you generally uh don't care if you don't have that many customers that do this online then it might make sense just to do it like this but like i said as you start to grow and if you're doing virtual products like this where they come in person then maybe it makes sense to have a scheduling option available so again we're going through a lot of different products here i know this is moving maybe kind of quickly for you guys but let's go and add the last one that i really want to talk about and this one i'm not going to cover too much because it's not something i do especially often but this is a grouped product so if we're going to do a grouped product this could be maybe for example if we're selling like surfboard fins but rather than selling a set we're selling individual ones maybe this isn't the best example but it was really what i could think of that was at least somewhat related to uh what we're doing right here the surf shop so like i said rather than selling just a set of like tri-fin quad fin setup maybe you have like individuals like medium fin large fin whatever and you want to sell them individually in case somebody breaks a fin or they don't need to replace all of their fins then that would be an example there so hang hang with me here you'll see exactly what i mean in just one second we're going to say surfboard fin fins maybe plural if you want and so here we can add our description i'm just going to leave that just some dummy text doesn't actually matter and we're going to go down and we're going to make this one into a grouped product now the way group product works essentially you will have a parent product right here and you have several child products underneath so for example right here this is a surfboard fin that's just the regular grouped product and then within that we're gonna have like medium fins small fins and you can choose how many of each you want to add so it's not especially different from variable product but the intent of of the product is definitely different so it makes sense that you're going to be setting it up slightly different here because it is a little bit more advantageous for for a specific need so we're going to actually just kind of save this one for now i'm actually just going to publish this and we're going to come back to this in a second because we have to make the child products of the parent product right here so this is the group product now what we want to do is actually go and add a new simple product but we don't want it to be shown in our catalog so right now i'm going to say single small fin and again i'm not actually sure i've only ever bought thin sets so i'm not actually sure how you would list individual fins if it's by size inches i'm not really sure exactly what it would be but you know just for example here we're going to go through and give some dummy text here as well we're going to make this one a simple product but like i said we don't want this to actually show up in our catalog so we're going to go right here the catalog visibility so right now it is showing up we're going to edit this and make sure that it is hidden from all of those so it's not going to show up we're going to say okay and that way it's hidden but it's still going to be used uh in the other product we were talking about so let's go down of course you can add all types of stuff the price and stuff like that but i think you guys understand how to do that by now so i just want to add an image and i want to let's go and upload a file here and select uh we have a lot of images available let's go with this one right here just serve fins so obviously this is showing multiple different fins here so we'd really want to just focus on one so that's not the best image to use but you get the idea and let's just say that this one right here is maybe like uh 19 1999 is the price and we're going to publish this one but of course it's published and it's public and everything but it is being hidden because we don't want people to just find this product we want it to be a child product of what we were dealing with before so if we go back to products if we just click on products it'll show us the products that we currently have and i'll talk more about this in just a second with the the stock and everything like that but if we go to our our grouped product here and we can go down to edit that let's go and edit the grouped product and we can go down and start changing we can start adding the product the child product to this one so if we go to linked products you can see right here of course we do have upsells as well but grouped products is going to be what is available here so if i just type in fin it should look for the surf fin the single small fin that we had and i'm going to leave that in here now we can add an image on here as well which is generally you should be doing that as well so let's go and add probably that same image would work just fine and just to really complete this i'm going to add another child product i'm going to say the large fin for the bottom as well so we're going to go and make another another simple product just single regular product so simple product i'm just going to kind of brush over this one quickly i'm not going to add an image so we're going to say single large fin and this one again we don't want it to be visible in the catalog or in search we're going to say okay we're going to publish this one i guess i didn't add a price but you get the idea of how that's going to work so now we can go back to the grouped product again and add this one to there so we have small fin large fin and of course surfboard fins is the group product like i said so we're going to go and edit that one and we're going to add another grouped product to this one so we're going to go down to the linked products and here we're going to add the large fin so a single large fin right there and we're going to update this and now when we actually view the product you'll see that people can order uh any quantity of any one of these so if we go to group or view the view the product you'll see that showing up pretty similar to what we were doing right here and we can add like whatever whatever quantity we have unfortunately the large fin we don't have the quantity there because i didn't actually add the price so once you add the price you will be able to do that so actually let me just do that really quickly and show you guys what we're dealing with there so if we go to products okay so here's what i was talking about so now you can see that we have different you know several different fin sizes as you can see right there and people could click on this and learn more about them if they wanted to but essentially it's going to allow you to choose how many of each one you want so if you want to get like a full set up you want two small fins and one large fin then that's how you go about doing that you can add them to the cart and it's going to go in and add those individual products but remember they're grouped together right here and it makes it kind of more convenient like i said for some types of products where you want to have those different variations kind of purchased in conjunction and i think this is really the best example i could come up with when you're dealing with the surfboard setup right here a surf shop but of course plenty of other products out there would make way more sense on how to do this so for like parts if you're dealing with a parts company then it would be very easy to add some different things like this so really any combination would make sense as well if you're trying to buy multiples of something and you have multiple different variations and people are going to buy like two of one one of the other three of the different one then this is a good configuration to use but those are essentially the six main styles of product i want to show you in this video and i think that was a really important thing to talk about which is why i took up a really large portion of this video here but now we can actually start getting into customizing this website and i think it's really important that you make at least a few of your products up front so you can start customizing your website and really build it out with the products you have so if we go back to our home page just by clicking on the logo on the top which we will change in a second you can see that the website in general is kind of like customized around like the best-selling products stuff like that like it's really product centric here so the fact that there are no products right now is because we deleted the ones that were previously showing up here but we can go and start building this website making it look better with the products that we now have available so let's go back to my wordpress on the top left and let's start talking a little bit more about what we can do with the products before we start customizing the site so for example we can talk about categories and we've done that a little bit but if we go to products you also have all types of things so you can see that what's in stock you can see the price of stuff you can add stars to things you can add tags to things and all that is going to make it very easy to manage your website in the long run but of course like i said if we go into categories right now we only have really one category that makes sense here we've got uncategorized which you're just going to leave it there we have groceries which i don't want i'm going to delete groceries because you don't want somebody going to like central surf shop.com groceries and finding like and just being confused right so i'm going to delete this one we don't want that and same thing with juice that doesn't make sense on this website so we can go about deleting that one but if we want to add a new category we could say that instead maybe it is uh like surf um surf learning to surf or something like that learning and maybe if you're just getting you know uh learn learning to which by the way reminds me that this would actually make sense to be a blog like a learn to serve blog which would be a great way to gain a lot of extra traffic on this site as it's something that people probably search a lot and once they find information they trust your brand a little bit more and you can also start pitching your own product there but right here we're going to say learn to surf is maybe a category for beginners that will have a lot of things relevant for them so we can go and add that as a new category you can add a thumbnail for that as well you can choose the url slug we're just going to add that as a new category and of course products could be added to this category tags are showing up down here all the different tagged products we have and of course attributes as well you can customize all of that if you go down to analytics this is not especially exciting now because we don't have any sales we don't have any traffic on this website at all so it's not something that anybody's really going to you're not going to see any numbers here in general but once you start making some some traffic or really getting some traffic and getting some sales uh this will start becoming more interesting and more meaningful and honestly you'll probably spend a lot of your time looking at this similarly marketing right now we don't really have a whole lot going on because it's not a fully fleshed out website but eventually you probably want to set up like a facebook integration you want to set up a mailchimp integration and i have videos on each of these on the channel as well so i'm not going to cover that too much in this video but if you want to have an email list mailchimp is a great way to do that if you want to start selling things on instagram or if you want to start selling them on facebook again we have videos on how to do that so you can integrate very easily and start listing your products on a more social platform and you can integrate all of that very very easily from right down here so those are those you know i pretty much just explained these tabs right here and now i think we're really ready to start customizing the website now the website is set up in kind of two different tiers you have your pages and you have your posts so pages are going to be essentially any permanent page that isn't changing it's not time sensitive is not a blog article and instead it's going to be like an about me page is going to be a terms of service it's going to be privacy policy stuff like that so let's click on pages and start there now you can see the pages uh there are a lot here that i mean depending on which template you use or which theme you're using you might have different ones appearing so maybe my account might not show up for everybody the shop page might not show up for everybody but generally it should be looking something like this now if we just want to go and start off with our home page which is this one right here we can go and click edit with elementor and it's going to open up like i said a nice convenient drag and drop editor that allows you to customize this as if it were just like a powerpoint slide or a word document it's very easy to do and i'm going to talk about what tools we have available and where they are so you guys can really customize on your own but like i said once you kind of get the hang of what the tools are available and where and how to change things like the fundamentals of it then it becomes very very easy to do so this is our home page and essentially on the right side the main screen here is what the website actually looks like this is what it looks like in real time it's live and as we start making changes of course it's not live we'll have to go and publish that with the little update button but this is what it currently looks like right now if you went to the website and scrolled down it would look exactly like this this is not some kind of weird like behind the scenes editor mode this is what it looks like now i know this might look a little bit intimidating so i'm going to go through all the different tools we have on the left side in a second but i want to start off with the right side and kind of give you uh the basic fundamental structure of how this is built and a really common layout for a lot of websites these days a lot of website builders is to use something called a strip layout in this situation they're calling them sections we can see right here the little blue icon on the top where we have a plus we have a little grid and we have an x and so if we just look on this if we click on that the middle one is to edit the section the left one is to add another section and the one on the right the little x is to remove this section now a section is essentially this entire area that has a white background so the strip layer like i said the section layout kind of interchangeable terms there as you scroll down you'll see that we have kind of different sections so this right here is going to be one this entire kind of dark blue background and then we have this is one section right here below that we have this kind of lighter tan color background it's another one this is another one so you can see all these different little sections here this one has a lot of smaller sections whereas most websites you go to a lot of blogs typically just have a couple large ones like this so maybe we'll change this to make it a couple larger ones but i mean it's up to you really the taste you have for your own website but you get the idea of how this is actually going to be laid out with these different sections we're going to get into actually editing them in a second but let's first scroll down and see if there's any that we want to remove so it looks like this one right here is probably just there for space so they could have that little leaf in there i don't really care about having that leaf there i don't really plan to replace it with anything so if we wanted to remove this section we can go and hover over it until we see the little blue icon and click on the x to delete that section and like i thought that's where the leaf was housed so the leaf is no longer there and so you can do that with a lot of these different sections if we want to get rid of this little banner down here again we can remove that we can remove this one i'm going to remove this one because i don't think that really makes sense there and of course going through these like there's definitely way too many sections for for my taste for a website i usually like a simpler home page than this but you know let's go through and see if we want to actually change any so this one right here customer reviews uh looks too complicated for what i'm doing with this site i want something simpler let's remove that one as well and again another thing to keep in mind is it's really important and we'll talk about this throughout this video it's important to look at this not only on a desktop or a laptop but also on some other displays some screens have different aspect ratios and the website will show up very differently similarly you should be looking at this on tablets which it actually lets you do uh down here and you can also do this you can preview it on a phone as well we'll talk more about that throughout this video but continuing on we're just looking at desktop mode right now really bare bones basics here and i'm going to remove this section as well and let's just say we want to add a section maybe right below this one here so maybe right in here we want to add a section we can click on the plus and it's going to give us the option to add either a blank section which it kind of does by default we can start dragging stuff over or we can actually do a little bit more than that we can have something from a template that we are essentially what we saved from before and i'll talk about that in a second or we can have kind of a pre-made one a starter template and i'm just going to click on this to show you guys a lot of these you're going to have to pay for but there are plenty if you look at blocks on the top so not pages but blocks you can look at a preset template block that you're able to use so if you want to if you really want to have something like testimonials rather than going and configuring all of that yourself a lot of times it's much easier to just go down and find something like maybe this right here would work really well as a testimonial section similarly you can go down and see like a quote right here that might be another testimonial you could do you could have like a slideshow of different quotes so there's a lot of ways to save you a lot of work so i highly recommend doing this especially if you're looking for a more complicated block i'm going to close out of this and not add one of those right now but you get the idea they're very easy to add in there instead let's look at fundamentally how we could build this out from scratch so if we click on the plus icon there it wants to know what the structure is so i mentioned the first tier of this hierarchy is essentially the the sections right here the strips now the second tier is actually the columns and so you can see we have a single column you can have a double column you can have three columns and you can move wherever the column is it doesn't have to be a center divide in fact some kind of already preset it to the left side or to the right side to make that easier but you could move it on your own after you choose this and so let's just say uh like this one right here you can see is a four column maybe down here i want to have like a simple little three column uh and in each of those columns i'm not sure exactly what i'm going to add but you'll see right there they are blank now the reason that it's not taller is because there's nothing in them yet so we're going to have to start adding different text and images and now we'll start to make this taller but if we click on that you can see that we have some settings for this section now on top of that we also have settings for the individual columns if we click on when we hover over column you see this little kind of book icon there if we click on that we can actually edit the column here if you want to have like a different background for these or anything like that now i'm getting a little bit ahead of myself right now let's start off kind of going back a little bit and talk about the settings of this section and then we'll talk about the settings of these columns and then we'll start adding stuff into the column so for this section right here we can actually go and click on that little six dot array and this on the left side this is where this kind of this panel really comes in handy and you can see that we have a lot of settings here a lot of this honestly you probably won't use in your website it's not like a lot of you can just leave on default but if you really want to customize it you will start to find some important things here like overflow vertical vertical alignment things like that and again i'm talking a lot about more of this stuff in detail if you guys want to check out my full tutorial on how to use elementor but for the purposes of this video we're really going to be looking at like the background is really what's most important i think and a couple other things like that so if we go to style after we clicked on settings for this section we can go and change the background here to a gradient something classic a video or a slideshow as well so if we go to video let's see if we have any videos on here i actually don't believe i uploaded any so maybe instead we'll just go with a simple a simple background now we can have a single image as you see right here or a color if we click on this little box here and so if i want this to be kind of like a maroon color or like a little bit of a darker uh maybe maybe like that actually this is this is this is going to be like a surfing website so let's go for something a little bit more uh lighter more beachy maybe something i don't know let's go with that for now so that's going to be the background for this section probably not the best color choice but you get the idea of how we're doing that now if we go down to edit the columns like i said you click on the little icon there and within the columns you could change the background of these as well if you go to background type you could also go to advanced and see like when this is being displayed so if you wanted this column to be hidden when you're on desktop you could do that or you could hide it on a tablet or on mobile so if there's ever like an image or something that you know like for example when this section gets moved to a mobile device when you open it up on a phone these columns are going to be stacked vertically and so if that doesn't make sense for you it might be a good idea to either hide this entire section or hide individual columns on mobile so that's just something to keep in mind a little bit more advanced but definitely very very good to know it's something i do on almost every website i ever make so with that being said we kind of understand the general structure now let's start adding some elements in here and if we go up to the top right of this little panel on the left side you'll see the nine dot array we're going to click on that and this is essentially our library of widgets we have now if you have elementor you're going to see basically just these elementor pro you're going to be able to use all of these and again as you start to build build your website i highly recommend you do that i'll have a link in the description below and it really gives you a lot of extra functionality but again like you can build a pretty solid website with just elementor the free version and of course if we go down to the bottom you'll see again some more free ones we can use if you want to have sound cloud some short code a sidebar like all types of different stuff we want to do down there those are all free to use as well but the main the middle section is all reserved for elementor pro and we're just going to use these top like 12 here or 10 here for this video so let's just say we want to have a heading right there so we can click and drag heading over to this area um then we can go back to the nine dots and maybe below the heading we want to have a little bit of text we can go to text editor and drag that below here as well and then maybe uh we say maybe right above that we want to have an image so we can go and drag an image until you see kind of that blue bar right above it so now we have an image we have a header and we have some text down there and so this is something i really want to have in all three of these so rather than actually going and doing that again and again it is even easier if you just right click on the little little icon on the top left there and duplicate that now when you duplicate it it does actually just add an extra column in here and we don't necessarily want that we do want three columns so instead i can go up to this one right click and we can delete this one so now we're back down to three columns and let's do that again to make sure that we have three of this kind of image graphic right there so we're gonna go and remove this one now and now we have three columns very easy to make that have the same layout that i would really be looking for here where you have an image you've got a header and then you have some text now when you actually want to go about editing these it's very easy you can just double click on that or really just single click on it yes i just kind of habitually double-click we can go down and we can add a heading here so we could say like surf rentals and then down here we can say check out our surfboard at south beach south beach and then here we can add maybe a link to that so if we highlight that highlight that text right there we can then click on the little link icon above that and we could link it to either a product or or really whatever we want so let's see if we can link this to our product so i know that our product has this link right here if i if i paste that in i hit enter then now anytime somebody clicks on that which honestly the color looks really terrible we'd have to change that but when somebody clicks on that it is going to bring them over to the product and they'll be able to do that now similarly this image right here let's go and add the image so we want to say this image we can use maybe this right here so we'll say insert this media and all again all i had to do there was just click on the image and then on the left side click on choose image in the middle and it's going to allow us to select the image we want and then go and insert that media and of course these are different heights so we'll talk about that in a second but what i really want to point out is if we go back to this image here click on this image we can actually make this a link as well so not only do we have a little link right here to the rentals which is our product that we're selling i believe it's actually lessons is what i called it so maybe we'll call this like surf lessons surf lessons we can actually go up to this image and we can make this a link as well so right here if we go to image down here you'll see link we can link to a custom url and we can paste the link there as well so uh now this entire image if somebody clicks on it it'll automatically shove them over to and if this is a product it makes a lot more sense it sends to send them over to our physical product now for the next one we could do the same thing we can say this is like music or whatever and keep in mind that with each of these images you can also change the alignment of them from left center and right doesn't really make sense in a little column like this but you can also change the size of them to make it something maybe slightly smaller to medium for example this one right here could be maybe slightly larger and you have a lot of different options here for customizing this to make sure that they're all approximately or maybe even exactly the same height now this is a very easy way to kind of customize this again this doesn't look good with the background i chose for something like this instead i would probably just choose like a plain white background on this entire section but you're getting the idea of how you can start to edit different things now let's say below this we want to add another section and let's take a look at some of the other things some of the other elements we can actually add here so i'm going to go and add a single column down here and in this column let's click on the nine dots and so we have a couple options here so we've got the the heading we've got an image we've got a text editor we've already used all of those now let's just say we want to talk about maybe dividers spacers and buttons those are three really important things that i use very very frequently so let's just say we have let's add a little header for this section here let's add an image for this section and then we'll add a little bit of text as well so an image right below that and then maybe some text below that scroll down and put actually here instead of just having regular text if you want to have one section uh so like one large image in the background uh then you wanna have like a heading you wanna have an image and then you have like two columns below that you can actually use this one right here the intersection allows you to have multiple sections within one big section without making uh two separate columns so instead you can have like this is a single column design but you have a little intersection here with some sub columns and then within there we can go and add whatever we want so we want to add a text editor in there and maybe in the other one we want to add a little header and a button so let's add a little heading and let's add a button which again is is very important so we'll go and add a button right there and so we pretty much understand how to edit images and headers and stuff like that uh so again like the header you can just highlight that the text tools pop up right there and on the left side you can change if it's an h1 a h2 what type of heading it is and of course if you go into style you can start to change the color and all types of things like that now i don't recommend changing the font for every single thing like in general it's best practice to keep maybe two or three different fonts on a single web page just so it doesn't slow down the load speed as you add more fonts on here it will make it a little bit slower to load your website which in turn google penalizes that and makes you rank lower in their search engine so that's just something to keep in mind i wouldn't recommend changing the typography too much uh you really want to do that in your theme but now let's talk a little bit more about our button here so if we click on the button the button you can change the text so we can just say check out or we could just say this product is order fins right so order some fins the link could be to our fins i think this was called surf fins so surf dash fins i believe is what that was i'm not positive but of course you would want to make sure you know what that is and we can change the alignment of this let's make this one centered let's make it a extra large button uh and then we can go and change if we want to have an icon in there i don't really want to have an icon and that's pretty much all i really wanted to do with that one it's very straightforward we can actually go into style and change the color if you want to but again for now i'm just going to leave it at that color as it is so that's pretty much what you'll want to know about setting up buttons if we go back to the nine dots i also said that spacers and dividers were very important as well so divider is going to essentially just be like a nice little line so if i want to put a divider between these two you can have like a line something like that generally kind of aesthetic in this situation doesn't look good but maybe if you wanted to add that maybe like under each under each header would be a good idea if you have multiple paragraphs near each other that would be a good idea and i don't really see anywhere else in this page that they did use them but it's something that you can very easily use throughout different parts of a different website and of course if we go back the last one is adding a spacer this one's very self-explanatory if we want to have a lot of room down here for some reason we can add a spacer and then the space it's a simple little slider to choose how big that spacer is it's currently using pixels right now so 221 pixels is that spacing there and of course depending on the resolution of your screen or the aspect ratio of your screen this would look slightly different but on this laptop that's how we're looking at that so that's essentially really all the elements i wanted to talk about how you can add those of course far more advanced ones below but let's talk about how we can edit the page that already exists and talk about how they actually went about building this so on the first one you can see this is clearly a two column setup where we have a column on the left and on the right the column on the left it looks like they only have an image in there the column on the right it looks like we have an image then we've got a header another header a little bit of text and then a button so again not a complicated layout but you can see how they use this to really customize the aesthetic there and make it look really nice and then i assume what they have in the background right there i believe is actually part of this entire section they just have a white image with kind of a faded little leaf in the corner again for the custom website we're doing right now it's surfing we'd want to change that but the way you'd actually go about doing that is clicking on the six dots on the top going over to style all right i see actually i was incorrect the way they have that down there is actually an overlay on the background so they have a white background and we can change that if you wanted if you wanted like a black background whatever but you'll see that that little leaf in the bottom right corner is still there and what instead they did was they added an overlay on the background another great way to do that um and so if you go to background overlay you'll see they have this image right here so we could very easily just delete that and that's going to go away and instead we could add really whatever we want like if you wanted to have this as your background overlay you could very easily do that and it's going to show up down in the corner as kind of a little faded background overlay you could change the location of that from bottom right to maybe like top right if you wanted for example or really anywhere you want so top right you'll see that's going to move up there that's not a great example maybe like a little wave would be a good example or something like that but you see the idea of how you're going to set up that now as we get on the next one this is a very self-explanatory one it looks like what they have is four columns in each one it looks like they have an icon and then they have a little bit of text right there so pretty easy to set that one up as well going down we'll see that the next section besides the one we made is another really nice one this is one that i would probably use a template for if i was going to add this section because although it's easy to make it's even easier because you have this background you have kind of a little shadow around all of these it's easier to just you know use a pre-made template but talking about how they made this it looks like they have a single or a three column set up here it actually almost looks like a single column with a three column kind of sub section right there so intersection it looks like what they were using and for each one if we click on the settings if we go over to style i believe it looks like they're using a shadow around the entire thing so if we go it looks like we have a plain background we don't have i don't think we have any oh we do have a border overlay so it looks like the reason that you have that kind of little intersection right there between the button being on top of that image is because that is actually a background overlay so really cool idea to do that instead of just adding an image down here and then you'd have a big space so a nice way to do that i think that was a good idea on their part and if we go to border you'll see they have a radius on the border on there just to make it give it a nice soft edge and make it look a little bit nicer other than that you can see we have some margin and some padding to give it like that nice little buffer between each one so you have that gap and we do have a shadow on these as well but within them it looks like all we really have uh would be like a little title right there some text and then here's a button and i believe this right here is actually just a spacer yeah you can see it's a spacer and that's how you're gonna choose exactly where those lemons go so the lemons move down here because it is a background overlay again really a good job on whoever made this template this looks really nice and then as we go down you see the other ones are going to be a little a little simpler but this right here looks like some short code which is interesting because it means that it actually has another functionality so this is something that isn't necessarily baked into elementor instead if you have any kind of third party apps if you want to have like a little quiz or some type of plugin then a lot of times what's going to happen is you'll have some type of software on wordpress and they'll give you a little short code that all you need to do is go down and paste right in here and it's going to allow you to have some type of functionality on your website right here that is otherwise not offered usually a little bit more advanced like i said a quiz is a good example of where a short code would be and it's like i said you can easily just go back to the nine dots go down to the bottom and you'll see short code and if you just put that in that's exactly what they did right there and then they pasted that code so you have that functionality but that's essentially how they went about making this page here i hope that kind of demystified elementor a little bit like i said we have a full tutorial on how to use it more in depth than i'm doing right here but the fundamentals at least you know how to customize uh your website right now and we can actually go down and click update and it's going to kind of publish the website make it up to date with what we did right now but if you didn't want to do that if instead you were working on it and you didn't want to send the website live you had maybe some more things you wanted to do you can instead go to save draft and then in the future whenever you are done editing you can go and update that and make it public now if we go and say preview changes it'll open a new tab it'll show us this website the home page and this doesn't necessarily have to be live so like i said if you're editing it and you're not ready to go live you can still preview and it's going to show you what it looks like in full screen here and you can see again you can interact with that you can see how everything works you can test the button so this right here i believe should go to our product it did that's good and if we click on the logo it'll take us back to the page we were just on so that's how you'll be previewing the page like i said we already know how to hide elements so if you go and preview it let's just say we go to responsive mode we want to see it as a a phone website right so if we go down here and like i said you click on responsive mode it'll switch between desktop site and mobile site now the mobile site here if we go down and we decide for some reason like something just doesn't look good so let's just say this section right here or this little column we just really don't like it like i said if you click on the little icon on the top left you go over to advanced and then we can go down to responsive and we can hide it on mobile so hiding on mobile means that this will no longer be here if we go to preview it i'm not sure if it'll let me preview in mobile view no it actually goes to desktop view but you can see this is essentially our preview it's grayed out right now because that just wouldn't be there altogether that section would be entirely missing um so when you're on a mobile site it's gone which in a lot of situations you will have to do because not everything is going to transfer perfectly from a desktop site to a tablet site and then over to a mobile site as well but with that being said let's go back to the mobile site which is where we are right now and that's really everything i wanted to show you in elementor so we can also go up here that's no other building really is what i'm going to talk about right now but let's go back and talk about some of the other fundamental things we can do here so let's update this and if we click on the top left for those settings you'll see that we have a couple options here so we can exit to the dashboard which i'm going to do in just a second but i want to quickly touch on the site settings the theme builder and the user preferences in case you're looking for some more advanced stuff like if you want to change the fonts throughout your entire website remember how i said it's not always a good idea to change individual fonts you can go back here and change like the fonts colors buttons stuff like that how things are actually set up on the global level meaning across your entire website similarly you could change whatever else you want in your in your site settings there so that it's going to be applied across all of your all of your different pages it makes it a lot easier to do so now let's go back to exit to dashboard that is essentially how you go about editing a page you can also add a new page as i mentioned before if you could add new and you can easily just do this from scratch i don't recommend doing it right here i recommend doing it with elementor so click on edit with elementor it'll take you into elementor and within here it's going to be very very easy to either do what we just did and build the website or build a page from scratch or you can actually just click on this little icon here like i said and import an entire page on the pages tab there for whatever you're looking for so maybe like if you're looking for an about page or some type of blog very easy to import all of that right here by blog i don't mean like blog articles i mean if you wanted to have like some page that would redirect to your most recent blog posts that's where you go about doing that so i'm going to click back and something else that i kind of brushed over very briefly right there is you'll see there are other editor things on the right side so besides just whatever your page is like whatever's on the page is important but what's behind the page is also equally important so that it's recognized by google and so that you're also managing your website in a proper fashion so the first thing is the title so you can change the name of this page if you want to i mean i highly recommend not calling it elementor number 4349 instead we can you know name it whatever we want similarly on the right side you'll see the visibility of that currently it's public you could publish it right now which which it uh we will do in a second then you can go down to other things like the permalink so right now the permalink is essentially what is on the end of your domain so central surf shop.com what and that's exactly what this is going to be right here so we could just call it um like about surf shop um like about surf shop i don't know if it's like an about us page or something like that you get the idea of how we change that we could add a featured image here and this would really show up on like sharing it on google or social media or something like that the featured image is usually a little preview that's going to pop up you can also go down to some after settings there if you wanted to and that's pretty much everything we'll need to do when updating or really creating any page in general so if we go and publish that we're just going to say yes we're going to publish that it's a totally blank page it doesn't do anything so not a great idea to do that but you'll see the pages is now live now if we click on the wordpress icon on the top left that's really all we need to know about pages i mentioned that there were two tiers there's pages and then there's posts posts are going to be edited in a very very similar fashion if we go to posts this is essentially the blog articles that you might want to put out and these would be things like if i made an article about how to surf or beginner mistakes for surfing or top equipment for surfing it's all very easy to kind of manage that and again if we go to add new you'll see really the same tools so i'm not going to dive too deep into this because i feel like i will be reiterating myself a little bit here we could go to edit with elementor do everything we were talking about a second ago but something that is slightly different is on here you're going to have a couple things on the right side a little excerpt right here and you want to make sure that you add i think it's about 155 characters as a little explanation of what this is and so like if i look up how to surf how to surf you'll see that we have i mean besides the video on the top you'll see that we have like a website right here so this is going to be the title of the page and then down here this is the excerpt so this is going to be uh what is poultrynet i think that's even longer than usual usually it's like about this long right here so this is actually it right here and that's what you'd want to have in this little box right here keep it kind of something short and explanatory but at the same time enticing for somebody to click on your article um and that's eventually how you start to get more traffic if you have this is really good and of course you have a good title a good idea and a well-constructed article but again i don't want to talk about articles too much in this video it's really focused more on the store so other than that those are the fundamentals for what you need to know of course i talked about media a second ago if you want to manage your media you can go here and like delete things or upload more in bulk it's a little bit easier to do that rather than uploading it when you need the images i find that building a website goes faster or more quickly when i have everything pre-uploaded that's something just i like to do in general general best practice there and if we go down here i mentioned before while we were adding the products that we do want to change the unit so don't forget that we're still using i think kilograms uh in centimeters and so if we go down to woocommerce we hover over that you'll see on the right side we have a couple options so if we go down to settings you'll have a whole array of different settings here and this is where you can really change um like the units like i mentioned a second ago so first you have your store address i think uh you might be depending on where you are i think in some locations it's legally required that you have a a business location listed somewhere so that's something that i mean look into your local laws of course this is not advice this is definitely not legal advice so you know definitely figure out what you need to do and add this if you need to otherwise it might just be best practice to add that for google reasons as well but then we can go down here and see currency so we have currency is us dollar it's currently on the left which makes sense we have a comma for a thousand a period for a decimal and we want two decimal places that looks like u.s currency to me then on the top we can go over to products here you're going to have a couple other settings as well so like what units we have down here so weight unit we want to use pounds in the us and we want to use inches as well so we're going to go and save those changes now and of course i recommend going through all of these different settings all the way across uh just to make sure that everything makes sense for you because you never know when you're gonna go across something and see like oh i didn't realize i was accidentally saying everything was in kilograms makes a big difference there right so going down to shipping this is where you can have like i believe this is a plug-in right here or at least you can have different plugins that can estimate the shipping of different items if you don't want to have flat rate sometimes flat rate is easier because you don't know where people are charging a flat rate can be very helpful but if you have a good plug-in a good software then it's very easy to kind of just estimate how much it's going to cost and charge them accordingly so that people who live like a mile down the road from you don't pay the same price as somebody who lives all the way on or all the way around the world to have a package sent to them okay so next we're going to talk a little bit more about optimizing for search you might hear of seo is a common term people throw around and this is search engine optimization and essentially what this means is you want to make sure that your website you can make a great website but you want to make sure that it's easy for google or any other search engine for that matter to recognize what your website is and show it to people who are searching for something related to you and so in order to do this there's a couple things we want to go through i mentioned before that you want to add like an excerpt and a good title on your on your on your posts and your pages but there are some other tools we can have that really help us out with this as well so if we go down to plugins we can go and add to some new plugins i'm going to show you guys a couple new plugins that i would recommend adding that i usually add these help me a lot with different websites the first one is actually called yoast seo so if we're going to go we can go and search for this so we'll go to plugins so i'm going to say yoast yoast seo and this one it's going to show up right there there we go so yoast seo we're going to install that again a very very useful one it's going to show up on the left side then so we'll install it install now it's going to show up over here it's also going to show up up in your post and it's going to kind of give you like a score on the seo and give you some suggestions just to make sure you don't forget anything and also to make sure that you're always improving and making sure that everything can rank as high as possible so go and activate that it should take a second to do that so that's the first one i recommend doing and of course you can go through we have an entire tutorial on yoast as well so you guys can go and check out how to actually set that up and how to kind of change like the site-wide things uh some default stuff to save you time as far as like uh titles go on different articles and things like that but other than that another really good plugin i recommend is actually called smush and i think this one might be bundled like the functionality of this might be bundled into some other plugins as well it's not especially complicated but if we look up smush essentially what this is going to do is help to improve the load speed on your website so i i mentioned before that load speed does have an impact or depending on when you're watching this video i assume it still does on the ranking of your website on google so if you have a website that takes a really long time to load google doesn't really view that very highly it doesn't think that that's what the viewers want to have because it knows that on google they want to be a reliable search engine so people can search for stuff and find good websites and according to google a slow load speed is frustrating to viewers and so that's why you want to make sure you have a faster website and so that's what we just did right there smosh is going to essentially take your images and kind of compress them do some lazy loading and other things to kind of improve the load speed of your website and then of course elementor i generally recommend going to elementor pro that's another really good plugin there but other than that there's not a whole lot of other ones that i would add right away i recommend getting started with these and then as time goes on you'll find some other functionality maybe you'll have to duplicate pages maybe you'll want word fence as security actually that's probably one we should add right now let's go and add word fence it's again not something that you always have to add but it's something in general i would recommend for a lot of websites so word fence so we get a word fence and this is going to be essentially a security like a little firewall for your website to kind of help to protect it at least to some extent and again this also has a premium option as well so you can really do some some white listing and blacklisting of different ip addresses if there's anything malicious out there going after your website which as it gets larger that's something that you definitely will want to keep an eye on okay so i think you have a pretty good understanding now of at least the basics for how to make this website how to make products how to make the website look better how to manage different pages and posts but some other things that we really want to do i'm going to talk about how to change this little icon up here in a second and then we want to talk about a couple other things as well but let's take a look at the website right now you'll see that ignore this little gray bar on the top this is what the website's really going to look like now and something you might want to edit is actually what's showing up here as you make more pages you might want to add them up here maybe you want to add a link to a social media page or something like that and you can really do whatever you want with this but you can't edit from here instead what you want to do is go back to your dashboard you want to go down to appearance and hover over that until you see menus click on menus and we can customize how this menu is actually set up so you'll see that right here these are the pages or these are the essentially the buttons we have the options we have on the menu and if instead we want contact to kind of be a subset of about we can click and drag that to the right and it will suddenly be a subset there so if we save the menu and we go back over here and we refresh this essentially about or contact should go away and it should be underneath about when you hover over it similar to how my account and cart are underneath account of course if you want to add something else you can go to the left side and say maybe this new page we have we can add that to the menu you can add a custom link so just a link to like whatever you want maybe that product for example and we can call it like surf lessons you can add that menu and of course we have tons of other options down here if you want to go to orders or or log out all types of different buttons that you can add to the menu and it's all very easy to do so if you want to actually remove this one you click the down icon you save remove and another really important thing to note is that the by default the name of your page is going to show up right here but if that's not what you want to actually show up on the button on the top you can click the little drop down menu here and change the navigation label uh to whatever you want so there we go we could just do something like that and then we'll say save and now all of this is going to show up on our menu if we go back over to the website here and refresh that you'll see that unless uh yeah there we go it is working right now so if we click on the new one we added surf lessons remember this is not actually a page this is just a link that i pasted there that goes to a product it'll just take us over by default to that product the surf lessons and so there's really limitless possibilities when you go back to actually you don't even have to go back the menu is just always up there you can go to any one of these and everything is laid out exactly as we designed it right there so that's a really nice feature i really like how that works and it's something that you definitely want to make sure you're customizing as you start to build more pages and add things to your website something else i want to talk about are actually some discounts again this ties back into woocommerce again so if we hover over woocommerce we can go down to coupons and within here you can create all types of different coupons really discounts for for whatever you want as you see down here uh they can be personalized they could be store credit they could be free gift they could be smart all types of different things and some of those do require extensions so like it says right there there are some extensions there but for the basic ones if you just want to make uh well i'll show you what they look like in a second if we click on create one you're gonna have a code and so let's just say this code is surf 2022 surf 2022 we can have a description if we want i'm not even going to do that right now and we can choose the the way this is going to be so it could be a fixed cart discount it could be a percentage discount or it could be a product discount so i'm going to say on the cart you are discounting maybe like 15 percent off so 15 percent off you could also just say maybe it's free shipping or something you can have an expiration date you can go down here and have a restriction right now there's no restriction but you could say you know if you spend more than like fifty dollars you will get uh a uh fifteen dollar actually i didn't mean to add percent percent would be that one so fixed card discount you could have fifteen dollars off if you spend more than fifty dollars um and so that that's like something you could add right there you could have a maximum as well if it's a percentage you could say like 10 off your order up to 500 or something if you don't want to discount uh too much on a large order similarly you can go down here and add products or exclude products for what it actually applies to or product categories uh or certain emails as well if there's somebody that you don't want to or if something that you do want to get the email so like allowed emails you could add people in there so they're able to get the discount maybe like if it's a members type thing if they're in your discord or whatever you could add their emails in here and of course you could have some usage limits as well to say maybe it's like one per uh one per coupon one per user whatever but for now we're going to leave it just as a basic 15 off if you spend fifty dollars and we can publish that and now that's going to work across our store if somebody goes to purchase something uh what did i say surf 2022 let's actually go over to our website right now and check that out i believe it should work like from the very beginning so if we go and add this to our cart that was not 50 so let's go and add something else to a card as well let's say maybe some surfboard fins we're going to add that to our cart we'll say we're going to buy one of this and 10 of this just to make sure we get some some cash in our cart and we'll go to view cart and of course we can add that coupon code right now so surf 2022 we'll apply that and i believe it should be taking 15 off there we go right there 15 off because we spent above that minimum threshold but if we started removing things that should go away if we lose that minimum threshold so if i remove this one i believe right there so it went away that was no longer a valid one so we'll try that again surf 22 and you can see applying it it does not show up because the minimum is 50 so really a nice robust system there i think that's a good way to make discounts uh kind of incentivizes larger purchases and also i mean maybe that makes it easier for your end for shipping or handling or whatever it might be when you're doing things in bulk a lot of times they are more affordable all right now there's two more things i really want to talk about in this video and these are absolutely essential to a a good-looking website and the first one is this little icon on the top that is the wordpress logo right now but we want it to be our logo when somebody's on our website so what we want to do is actually go down to appearance hover over customize click on customize and then we'll actually go to our header so it's going to show up in a lot of different options here go to header um so header builder sure that looks fine and we can actually customize the header a lot more as well if you want it to be like add your own logo do all types of stuff like that but we're going to go to site identity and logo and then within here this is the logo we have but if you go down you'll see that we currently don't have a little icon on the top they call it a site icon that's what's going to show up on the top right there so we're going to go and select one and you have a lot of options really like it's just kind of a restraint on the size of it but i'm just going to add let's just say this one for now maybe that's the logo of our company obviously it's not but that's going to be appearing in the top up there so once we save this that's exactly what it's going to look like so we can publish that but like i said this is also a good time while you're here to change like the logo on your header and really customize this because all that can be done within the header header editor right here it's kind of hard to say and as we go back we can actually add some different things with cart and customize the primary menu transparency of that and tons of other settings with your website within essentially this is the editor for your theme i didn't want to dive into this too much because it really does look different for different themes so this one gives us quite a bit of selection here we can also edit the footer on the bottom with the footer builder here and so i recommend going through that on your own time and kind of customizing these things and making it making sure it's your own logo your own text everything makes sense but again i didn't want to dive into that because different themes are going to show different things now i know most people are watching this video probably using astra but technically you don't have to you could use some other theme and still end up with the same destination here so we're going to go and publish this right now and that takes care of that icon now the last thing i really want to talk about is really really important this is something that we could have done in the beginning but in general i just always procrastinate and push it to the end and i want to talk about these settings for our wordpress site so if we go down to the bottom you'll see settings sorry let me just scroll down you'll go to settings right here and within settings we've got a bunch of tabs so the first thing is the site title instead of just another wordpress site which is going to show up on the top we want to call this santrell surf shop and then like the best best surf shop ever that's our domain don't change that you want to make sure that it is https though so not just http that way you really want to make sure that you are using encryption on here you're not just you know right there as unencrypted which in general is not best practice for a website we can also go down here and say that if we want to add more users we can go down to users actually that's not in settings that's over here users are slightly different but the date format i'm going to leave it as it is right now some people like to use it slightly different there and we want to make sure that let's save our changes we'll go back to permalinks then and we want to make sure this is the other thing i like changing when you're looking at your new posts sometimes it's just like by default it's going to be question p equals and like some number that's really not the best way to name all your different posts as you make them instead i like to do it this way we're just like by default your domain slash than the post name but of course you could have a little custom thing where it's like instead of post you add like blog so slash blog slash post name if you want to do that to make sure that all of your blogs have a little special thing on the end but in general like i said i usually just leave it at post name something that you should check to make sure that you do have that selected because i do think that is probably the best way to structure a blog at least that's my opinion on this of course if you guys have a comment about anything in here a question or you really want to know more details about anything i did in this video please leave a comment down below and of course i hate that i have to say this but uh watch out for scammers in the comments below a lot of times people are asking it for like your whatsapp or your phone number or or bitcoin or who knows what they're asking for we don't comment and ask you for money we don't ask for your phone number we don't send you private messages that are unsolicited uh so don't worry like none of that is going to be us that is all scammers anytime we make a comment we are probably going to heart our own comment and that's how you're going to know that it actually was us commenting something but but in general just be really careful about scammers down below and and really protect your own privacy there if you guys enjoyed this video please do consider liking and subscribing share with a friend with anybody that might be interested in signing up and making their own online store like this and as always guys don't forget to use the links in the description they do help to support the channel so thank you for watching and we'll see you next time you

Channel: Santrel Media

Views: 7,511

Keywords: nate o'brien, mike o'brien, santrel media

Id: P8vZ15qyOPM

Length: 123min 53sec (7433 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021