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Lesson Info

How To Choose Your Theme

All right. If you're on this video, it is time to choose a custom theme, and I've always told my students on Shopify it is so simple to get a great theme up and running to where it looks like you had this mega professional website built. Um and literally they just give you free themes. There are themes that that cost money, but I personally use the free theme. Okay, so that being said, if you come over here to the left hand side of the menu and you click on online store, you'll see a sub menu and it says themes that sometimes will automatically open that up and it will tell you that you have the option to change your theme and customize it. Or you can browse some free themes. Um or you can go and you can buy some themes because lots of people create very nice themes that they sell, that you can one click install on your Shopify stores. So ultimately that's up to you right now, as things stand, this is what we have right here. So this is the actual shop out of the gate. As soon as you o...

pen up your Shopify store, it is a clean slate right here. So what we want to do is we want to come in and we want to put, you know, our little sizzle on it, we want to make sure that it's the color we want, we want to make sure that we have the logo, that we want, the navigation menu that we want, we're displaying, you know, any products that we want. It's all very, very simple when you're using the Shopify platform. So what I'm gonna do first is I'm gonna come down, scroll down a little bit and there's this button that says free themes. You want to go ahead and click that button that says explore free themes. Now, it's gonna load the free themes that they've made available to you. And all of my students come to me and ask me Adrian what theme do you use? Because we want to make sure that we're copying or we're duplicating or mimicking something that's already been massively successful. So I usually I've used a couple of different themes in here, but the one that I seem to like the best is the supply theme. Now, ultimately you got to choose you know which one you think is best for you. But I like this one right here, it's called the supply theme. So let's go ahead and let's click on that, and when we click it it's gonna give us all the feature list they got built in large catalogs, collection sidebar, a slide show image. So if you have, if you have sales or special deals going on uh that's in there, and then, of course, there's two different styles included. There's the light style which we're looking at now and then there is this blue style. Okay, so you'll be able to go in and change these colors. Um you know, it's not a big deal, but I usually just go right here with the basic light style, It has served me well, and it's completely free. So getting started, you can't beat that. So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to click on add supply theme now, what's happening here is Shopify is adding that theme to my account, literally one click boom. And I have that theme on my account. So, very, very cool. Now when I scroll down, you'll see that. It says more themes theme name. And then right here we have the supply theme. Right? So let me just go back. I want to do this again. I like to repeat myself when I'm teaching my students because I believe the more you hear it, the more likely it is to sink in repetition is key to learning. So right now, this is what we have, we have the bark shop, we have this basic theme that Shopify gives you out of the gate and what we are going to do now is we are going to change to the theme to the supply theme. This one that we just said, we would rather use all we have to do has come over here and click on actions, you see that, and then we are going to publish this theme. Okay, now, when we publish a theme, it means that it actually goes live. Like online, this is what our store is going to look like. It's going to use this theme. What's important to take note here, to take note of here is that you can have 10 different themes on your store or more and you can kind of interchange in in switch them out throughout the year if you would like to buy publishing one at a time. Right? So I'm gonna hit publish and it's gonna say, are you sure you want to publish the Supply theme? Now? The reason would ask that is generally when you choose a new theme, you want to go in and customize it first before you publish it, but we have a new store and there's nothing on it. So, um it's all good, we're going to publish it, takes it a couple of seconds here and boom, Now, you're going to notice this preview up here now, says supply, and we have a different looking theme. Now, check this out when I come over here to the live store and I click refresh, everything looks different, right? So we have a different looking store now, we've got this colored bar. I really like this navigation bar at the top because we can customize this to have our colour of our brand on it. And it's just, it's very simple, clean and it converts. Okay, so now what we want to do as we want to go in and we want to explore the customization process of the Shopify theme. And listen, I am not a technical person, I am not good at building websites, I am not an engineer, I'm not a programmer, I don't know. Html I'm just a really good marketer. Alright, so I was able to go in and do this myself and get through it with zero experience. And that's another reason I always tell my students I absolutely love Shopify is because I could come in and design an amazing looking high converting store using their free theme and they're simple dragon. Drop click here, click there tools with zero technical know how of coding and html and all that stuff. Okay, so now that we've click the customize button, we now have full control to make this our own right. So we could go in and we can change the header, we could change the slide show right here, that's this big piece. This is a big old banner right here. We have featured collections. So if you have like featured sweatshirts or you have featured, you know, pillows or T shirts or whatever it may be. You can feature those on your home page. You also you can edit your slide show and then you can add some text down here at the bottom uh to tell a little bit about your store. Now, what we're gonna do is we're gonna make this bad boy look completely different than what you see right now. Okay, you also have general settings. Now, see up here, you have sections in general settings, sections in general settings and the general settings. You're able to start customizing the colours of your store, the fonts that are being used, what your favorite con is. That's the little logo that shows up in the tabs on google, chrome or Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer. You can customize your shopping cart process, social media, pricing format and the checkout process. It's all here. So let's start out first by choosing the colors. I'm gonna be honest, I'm not fond of this, like I don't know what color this this is. So I change it um I love blues and I like greens. So I'm gonna come up here to primary content and they've got a great little color picker right here and I can just start choosing my own color. So our shop that we're customizing right now, it's called the bark shop. I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna choose a nice color for it. So let's just choose this like a greenish color. And now our primary content, which is our text links. Primary buttons, it's gonna be a bluish color. Okay, so that's going to be down here. Um you can see everything now. Is this bluish till ish color right here? All right, so I like that because it really sticks out. All right, and we're gonna match this board, this uh navigation menu up here with that as well. Alright, our accents, arc, arc, arc, arc quantity, body background. All that stuff is customizable or review star colors. Now down here is where we start playing around with the header. So we've got our background, our text links or cart button and our main menu background. So let's go ahead and change the main menu background. Okay, so I told you I wanted to match it to this, right this color right here, I just think it looks good. So I'm gonna come back up here to our color picker and see this little code here. I'm just gonna copy that so you can right click and copy now. We're going to come down here to main menu and I'm gonna paste it. Boom. All right, just like that. Now, if I come up here now I've got this set up ready to go um it's the color I wanted to be and it looks good, right? And it sticks out much more. Now you can choose uh stuff for your footer as well, you could change all of that good stuff down here, but I usually just leave that be in terms of you know what color the footer is and the text is, it's not that big of a deal. The main things I like to pay attention to are the links so people can see that these are clickable and of course my header. Alright, so I'm gonna go ahead and hit save and now we've saved our changes. Now, I'm gonna be able to scroll backward and we can go over typography. Now with typography we can choose what fonts we want to use. So by default it's Roberto or Roboto, I don't know how it's pronounced. Uh So but we could just click on anything and we can change these fonts and I'm not gonna do this too much because I I think it's pretty basic. You could change the size of the fonts, uh the navigation menu button styles all of that is stuff that you could change. Okay? You can capitalize buttons, you can make them lower case whatever you want. So that being said, oh by the way, look up here at the top right? You see where it says cart. So it's in caps. If you don't want it all in caps then you click this button and it's not but I would leave it caps. Alright so this all looks good. There's not much to do right there. Uh Your favorite con you just drag and drop an image that you would like and that image is going to display on the tabs in someone's browser. So if you have a logo or something you can put that they're your shopping cart. Also you have a couple of options. You have a drawer and you have a modal and you've got a page. Alright, so everyone has a different preference. I personally use a modal window that's like a little pop up that comes up when they click add to cart and you'll see that later on. Once we actually get products on here right now, we're just kind of going through and we're messing with the basic settings. You've got your social media. So if you have social media accounts, all you have to do is type them in right here where it says twitter, facebook, Pinterest, google plus instagram. If you don't have those set up yet, it's totally fine. You can come back and do this later, but I do want to show you kind of how it works. So I'll just make something up. All right. All right. So you could come over here to facebook and they give you the example of what you're looking for, what they're looking for here. So you type in your web address. All right. To your facebook account. Don't put Shopify is in there anything like that. And they're going to make sure that on your website, on your store, it's going to link to your facebook page everywhere possible. Right? And you could do Pinterest and google and instagram so on and so forth. So you just want to go fill in the ones that make sense for you. Um And of course then you would want to add those with your not with Shopify, but with your actual social media and then click safe. So once this is done um everywhere on your theme where it shares social media, it will put those links for you. So it's very nice that that's built in because when you get followers on social media, it's gonna help your branding pricing format. I just leave that alone and then check out. Um you can go in and you can add a custom logo to your checkout process. Uh that's when people actually start putting in their credit card number and their information. So when we get a logo, we will come and we will put our logo in. So, as people are checking out, they see our logo in and that's, that always works out very nicely. All right, coming down over here, let's go back to sections, and once we come over here to sections, you can kind of drag and drop this stuff and you can reorder, you see how I'm dragging and dropping this, and Shopify is basically zooming out and then showing me where I'm placing it, You don't have to use all of this stuff right here. So for instance, you might not have a slide show as soon as you open up your store, you might not have some massive banner for sale or anything like that. That's totally fine. If you don't, you just click on slide show and you can delete the section, right? Otherwise you can add in multiple images and you can upload those images and it will slide through like a carousel like this and it will display all of your top deals and all of your options. So, in the future, once you have a bunch of stuff on sale, you may want to come back here and add in the slideshow. But for now we're gonna delete that section and you'll see now it is gone. There is no slide show. What we have is our featured items right here. So our featured items and we have our featured collections down here. All right, so, you've got your collections. This could be our Dog Lover t shirts. This could be our Dog Lovers sweaters. This could be our Dog Lover pillow covers. Yes, pillow covers. You'll see that pretty soon. All right. It's crazy. The print on demand stuff that you can sell is absolutely nuts. Uh, if you're not gonna use all of these, you can make your your homepage very simple, very basic. You can get rid of this stuff, check this out. All you have to do is hit delete section. You can delete this other slide show. I love just making mind mega basic. Um, and just having a couple of things on the home page. So, you'll notice now, we've just got these two big images here which will kind of be featured products. And then we've got one collection right here and then we have our footer down here and we can of course drag and drop, rearrange, we can add sections. So if we want to have another collection list or featured collection, slide show, a video, it all can be added literally by just clicking this button right here, then we can go ahead and we can click save. Okay? So what we've done in this video is we've basically gotten rid of a lot of the stuff that we're not going to use to make a very simple, basic looking home page and we can come back and edit this later if we please. The second thing we did is we changed up the main, primary colours of our header. Uh well our navigation bar and then all of our links. Now we're going to come back to this and as we add products to the store, you're going to see that this is going to turn into a beautiful shop that looks very professional and if somebody lands on the store they would have absolutely zero clue that I'm just some guy at my house that built this with a couple of clicks, it's gonna look like, you know, it is a big brand, that's what's so cool about their platform. The Shopify platform makes it very simple. So these are the basics of setting up your theme and we've got to come back once we had products to the store and we're going to have to tweak this a little bit. So this is the basics, I hope you enjoy this video. It's very simple. Go ahead, click around, set up your own theme, choose your colors, choose your layout and get ready to go to the next video because we're gonna be building our logo. I'm gonna show you free way to building your logo. We've also recommended some resources and we're gonna add that to our store and you're gonna see it come up here and replace this text that says the bark shop. So once again it's Adrienne Morrison. Go ahead and I will see you on the next video. Yeah.