Day 1: Start Building Your Website

By now, it’s still Day 1 and you’ve already:

Purchased your shipping materials
Bought your domain name for your new website

Now let’s get into the business of actually building that new website. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be hard!

Instead of the design we’ve done so far with the step by step written walkthrough, this is going to be done via a screen video so you can watch the whole thing and see exactly how to do it.

Our daughter Linnaea (who with our daughter Melanie set up our Shopify storefront) is the one talking to you in these videos. Just so you’ve got a face with the voice, here’s a picture of her. She’ll be your guide through this online setup part!

First, to get ready, click below to go to the shopify website so you’re ready to follow along with the video.

click here to go to the shopify website

So now, click below to view the video walkthrough on how to launch your Shopify store, connect your domain name to Shopify, and do it all from scratch!

Quick Note From Linnaea: Hi everyone, sorry about a little background noise here. Like all of you, I’m stuck at home right now, so apologies in advance for the occasional dog barking in the background! 🙂

Tasks to Complete Before Moving On (see how in the video)

Launch your Shopify website and start a free trial
Link your Godaddy domain to Shopify
Tour around your backoffice as shown in the video and familiarize yourself with Shopify
Pick a theme and activate it (you can always change this later, don’t worry)!

You will be able to access your Shopify login later, but I think the easiest way to do this is to save the “admin” URL. To do this, go to “home” of your dashboard and copy and paste the URL. Save it somewhere so that whenever you need to log in to your store, you can click that. I’ve shown in the screenshot below where the URL is that you should save.

Also, as promised in the video, here are the apps we use on our online store. You may or may not need all of these, and we’ll explore some of them more thoroughly later:

Aweber Add Subscriber (integrates our email newsletter program with our storefront)
MinCart by Molsoft (allows us to require a cart minimum before people can check out)
Order Deadline (shows a countdown on products to our next shipping day)
Order Printer (allows us to bulk print order invoices and packing lists for shipping)
Wishlist by Wishify (allows people with accounts on our storefront to create a wishlist)

One more note on Shopify.

When your free trial ends and you need to choose a plan, the best plan for you really depends on your monthly sales. Since Shopify charges a smaller percentage per transaction on the $80 plan versus the $30 plan, if you have a lot of sales the $80 plan might actually be cheaper. So to calculate which plan is best for you, visit the page linked to below. Enter your monthly sales and also say “Yes” that you’re using Shopify Payments.

Calculate the best plan for you here

Got Questions?

Direct Message us on Instagram here! Either Linnaea or Melanie (another of our daughters) will get back to you!

Once you’ve completed the tasks above, you’re done with your work for today!

Congratulations, you’re well on your way to selling and shipping product. In just one day, you’ve purchased all the shipping materials you need, chosen a name and web URL, and created a website. Tomorrow we’ll move on to starting to design your website and creating your products. Lots to do!

Head back to the main page of the course