WooCommerce Wordpress Plugin - Create an eCommerce Website

Important information on the installation of WordPress.

This video explains why you need to have an SSL certificate with your domain, so that all communication between the visitor and your site is secured. 

This video will give you the information you need to setup WordPress on a web host, and make sure you have the SSL certificate that is essential for an eCommerce site.

This video will give you the instructions you need to get WordPress setup on your own computer.

A quick video to show you around the Dashboard and stuff that WordPress, or your host, may have pre-installed.

A good backup program will take backups automatically and send them to cloud hosting, in case anything goes wrong with your site/server.  This video looks at a great free backup plugin I recommend for all WordPress sites.

This video shows you the basic setup of a security plugin.  If you have a different favourite security plugin you can use that instead.

How trusted and safe is WooCommerce?  You should  know this before you build a shop using the tool.

A big advantage of WooCommerce is the support it has from third party developers.  There are lots of plugins that can take your eCommerce store to the next level with fancy features.

Let's install WooCommerce on the site.

A look at the site with WooCommerce installed, to see what WooCommerce has brought to the table.

This video looks at the items added to the WordPress Dashboard by the WooCommerce plugin we installed.  It also acts as a quick orientation to the WooCommerce environment.

This video takes a quick look at some of the settings in WooCommerce.  As we build the site, we'll come back and revisit the settings as we need to.

A look at some themes you can use on your eCommerce Store.

The built in page editor is WordPress is called Gutenberg, but it does have some serious limitations.  This video looks at those limitations and mentions the solution.

In this video, we'll install Elementor so we can explore it's potential.

Elementor works with the theme to control layout, colours and fonts.  This video introduces the concept of how the two work together.

This video explains the Box Model which is vitally important for web designers to make sure elements align properly.

This video shows how to change Elementor so that it looks the same as in the videos of this course.

All web pages are built up of elements on a page, arranged horizontally and vertically on the page.

This video looks at a few of the elements you get with Elementor, and how to find them.

This video looks through the properties you can set for the blocks and sections you can add to your pages.  It's not as scary as it looks.  Honest...

Where can you get more information on Elementor?

WooCommerce offers an import tool to get databases of products into your store.  This video shows it in action.

Products can be divided up into Categories, so this video will introduce categories and add a few.

Tags are another way to categorize products.  This video explains how you can use them to help your visitors.

Simple products are the simplest type of product you can sell in your store.  This video looks at what they are and how to add them.

This video shows how to set up variations for some T-Shirts that we want to add to the shop.

Variable products are a little more complicated to add, but this video takes you through the process.

This video shows you how to add an "external" product to your site.  These include affiliate products, or any product that is sold on another website and won't be added directly to the cart on your WooCommerce site.

WooCommerce allows you to add downloadable products on your site.  This video shows you how.

Grouped products are the final type of product you can add to your site.  This allows you to bundle more than one product together into a "package" that your visitors can buy with a single click.

Upsells and cross sells are important tools for your eCommmerce website.  This video looks at what they are and how to use them.

This video looks at the email addresses you will use to run your eCommerce store.

Legal pages are an important part of any website.  This video briefly discusses them.

Two other pages that are important on your site are the contact form and about us.  These can actually be merged into a single document if you want.

In this video we'll go through the entire process of adding a product with variations.  The product we'll look at is one I want to add to my photography store.

This video tells you how to import the products from my demo site into your own store so you can play around with them.

This video looks at how you can configure the taxes for your shop.

Let's set up the shipping options for our site.

WooCommerce has three default payment methods that are easy to set up.  This video looks at direct bank transfer, cheques, and cash on delivery.

Paypal is a common way to pay for products, so this video shows how you can set that up.

Let's see how easy it is to set up credit and debit card payments in WooCommerce.

This video shows how you can deactivate a caching plugin that Bluehost installs.  This is necessary because otherwise, changes you make in the backend may not show up on the front-end immediately.

This video shows you how to create a header for your eCommerce store using the powerful Header Builder inside the Astra theme Customizer.

This video shows you how to create a footer area for the pages of your store.

This video adds in a special homepage header section, with parallax effect.

This video shows part 1 (of 2) of the homepage design.

This video is Part 2 (of 2) of the homepage design.

In this video, we'll look at adding a sidebar to the shop page.

There are a few customizations we can make to the way the product pages appear.  This video looks at them.

There are customizations available for other pages that WooCommerce created, so let's see what you can do.

To change the default buttons on the WooCommerce store, we need to change the Astra theme's global settings for the buttons.

Credibility is vital if your visitors are going to have confidence in you and your eCommerce store.  This video offers some ideas.

If visitors can leave reviews, it's important to know how to handle them.

Its important that your site looks good on mobile and desktop devices.  This video shows looks at the Customizer and how it can help.

Its important that your site looks good on mobile and desktop devices.  This video shows looks at Elementor and how it can help.

This video looks at how to create and use coupons on your site.

Load more products plugin creates an auto-scroll in your shop, so new products appear at the bottom as the visitor scrolls down.

Most eCommerce stores have a Wishlist feature.  These are easy enough to add to your WooCommerce store with a plugin.

A lot of eCommerce stores use swatches for displaying variations in products.  This video shows how you can add swatches to your site.

This video shows you how you can keep the cart visible at all times for the visitor as they browse your store.

WooLentor is a versatile plugin for configuring your store.  This video shows an example of changing the shop page.

Changing button text in WooCommerce is not as easy in some cases as perhaps it should be.  There is a plugin that can help though.

This video shows where the components of WooCommerce are located in the WordPress Dashboard.

The home tab will take you to the wizard to let you know what you still need to do and offer suggestions.

The Orders section is where you can handle all orders coming into your store, change their status, and issue refunds.

Find customers so you can send an email to them or download all customers to a spreadsheet.

This video goes through the General settings in the WooCommerce menu.

Let's go through the settings on the Products tab.

Let's look at the tax settings.

This video looks at the shipping options in WooCommerce.

Let's have a look at the payment tab in the settings.

Let's go through the settings in the Accounts & Privacy section.

Let's look at the email options.

WooCommerce lets you integrate geolocation to make things easier for your customers.  This video explains how to set it up.

The advanced section is not something we'll look at in detail, but we'll just check out what is there.

The product menu is where you can add products and configure them. 

Products can be organized into categories to make your site more intuitive for visitors.  This video looks at an example of their use, and how to create them.

Tags are an additional way to categorise your products, making your site more intuitive and easier to navigate.  This video explores the use of tags.

Let's look at the attributes screen.

This screen allows you to handle product reviews.

A quick look at the Analytics menu.

The Analytics settings allow you to configure what is shown in the reports.

This screen provides a snap shot of your shop's data using various panels.

Let's look at the products report.

This video looks at the revenue report.

Let's have a look at the Orders reports.

The variations report will allow you to analyse how well the variations you sell are working out for you.

The categories report can be used to drill down into a single category or compare sales from different categories.

The coupons report can help you analyse how the coupons on your site performed.

Knowing how much tax you've collected on sales is important, so the Tax report will give you the data you need to pay them.

The downloads report shows how many files have been downloaded in the relevant date range.  Let's look at it in this video.

The stock report can help you keep on top of your inventory.

Just a quick heads up to this section.  Lots of tools and information to grow yoir store.

This video looks at the coupons section of the marketing section in WooCommerce.

This article provides information about resources mentioned in the course.