Transcripts
1. Starting an ecommerce website : Hello and welcome to the Entrepreneur Hustle where we are going to be creating an e-commerce website from scratch. We'll be creating a full e-commerce website with digital and physical products and will be using technologies such as WordPress, Woo Commerce, Stripe, and PayPal for accepting payments. This course is for entrepreneurs who are looking to get started selling products online, whether they're digital or physical products, we'll be covering both in this course. Now if you're looking to learn how to code a website, that's not this course. In fact, there's actually no coding at all in this course, so don't feel like you need to be a web developer or some programmer to make this happen, you can actually do all of this without any of that skill. Now by the end of this course, you can actually see behind me, that is my website. Now it's not complete yet. You'll be able to see the complete, finished version inside of the course, but you are going to be creating a site that looks pretty similar to this. Now it's going to look a little different in terms of different logo, different colors, it's going to have your branding and your personality on it, but the theme is going to be very similar. We're going to have a shop and contact page and a blog, and if all of that sounds a little bit overwhelming, please don't feel overwhelmed because I'm going to take you through every step of the way. You literally do not need to know anything to get started with this course. Some background information about me. I am Kalob Taulien. I'm a serial entrepreneur, I'm a senior web developer, and I'm an online instructor. I've taught over 200,000 people worldwide. I've been making websites for well over 20 years, if you can believe that, "wow" that's a long time. I've actually started several companies and sold them using this exact process, so you can actually know that at the end of the day, I'm not just some guy on your screen telling you to do things I've never done, I have actually applied these. I have learned from my mistakes, I've learned from my successes, and I'm giving you my real-life experience in this course. Now I'd love to help you build an e-commerce company, and if all of this is sounding good to you, you can head on inside and we can get started right away.
2. Before we get started: Hello, and welcome to the first official lesson of this course. Now, before we get started, I would like everyone, if possible, to do a quick little exercise. So you already know that this course is about making e-commerce website without having to know all the web development and technologies, things like that, and it's going to be a great and easy course to do. You don't need to know all the technical jargon behind it. I'm going to walk you through all of the easy ways to do this. But before that, I would like us to all share our ideas. What are we planning to sell? So for me, on this e-commerce website, I'm going to be selling t-shirts, nice and simple. I'm going to be selling physical t-shirts and digital assets to help maintain t-shirts. So maybe like a PDF, maybe like a video course about how to maintain your t-shirts, keep them nice and white, things like that. This is not a real thing that I'm going to be selling, but I will leave the demo site up at the end of this course. But for you, what you could do as your exercise, before we get started, is take your idea that you have right now, whatever you want to sell, and just share it in the section down below. You might inspire other people. I think we can build a community around this. I think this would be really, really fun to do. So yeah, go ahead, create that comment down below and just share what you're thinking of selling. Or if you don't know yet, maybe get some ideas from other people. All right, once that's all finished up, I will see you in the next video.
3. Creating your account: Hello and welcome back. In this video, we're going to create a flywheel account. Now, Flywheel is a service that we're going to use to manage our WordPress website, and we will be using WordPress. If you're familiar with WordPress, that's great, but if you're not familiar with WordPress, that's totally okay. I'm going to walk you through WordPress, a little bit later, and just show you the ins and outs of it. You don't have to be a WordPress expert to know what you're doing. Flywheel itself is a really great service, because it manages your databases, it manages your servers, and it manages your backups, it does all sorts of really great things for you, and we are going to start with this for free. If you want the premium option, if you're a premium type person, you can always use wpengine.com. But we're not going that route, because we want to make this a little more accessible for everybody, and I don't honestly want you paying like $35 a month, while you're just like developing a website. That's not cool. Let's dive right into this and let's set up your first free account on getflywheel.com. The first thing you need to do is go to getflywheel.com, and let's go sign up. Let's create our account. I'm just going to create my own account here, Kalob. My username is going to be KalobT. Let's see if that one's available. My email address is going to be ecomm.kalob@gmail.com. I would best describe myself as a site owner, but there are other options in there. Maybe your agency, freelancer, designer, developer, blogger, or a single site owner. We're going to say single-site owner. How did you hear but flywheel? You could if you wanted to say, from a friend, co-worker, and put my name in there, Kalob Taulien. Honestly, that's not necessarily so I'm going to skip past that, and a password. I'm just going to put in a quick little password here. I agree to flywheels Terms of Service, sign up, and no, don't save that. The browser I'm using here is just Firefox. You can use Chrome, Safari, Edge, whichever browser you like. You're going to probably want to do this on your laptop or your desktop, probably not on your phone. Although, you can definitely do it on your phone, it's just going to be a little bit harder. You can see that I'm signed up here and it says, "Thanks for signing in. Can we ask for a small favor?" Basically, they want us to share this on social media, we're not going to do that, and voila, we have our first account. It's not really a website yet, it's just our account. We're going to make a website in the next video, I believe. If we go into our inbox, we can see that I've got an email from flywheel here, "Welcome to Flywheel, " and I just need to verify my account. I'm just going to click that link. Verify my account, and it says, "Oh, how do you want to verify, with a text message or do you want to verify with a credit card?" Well, I don't want to pay for anything right now and I don't want you to pay for anything right now. Just verify with the text message if you have a phone number. I'm going to put my phone number in. It's going to give me a six digit number, and I'm just going to have to put that number in. They'll text it to me, so it'd be nice and easy. All right. I just put my phone number in there and I check my phone real quick, and the number they gave me was 2, 9, 0. I'm not even typing here. 2, 9, 0, 4, 4, 1. What they're really doing here is saying, we want to make sure that there's a real person behind this. Don't just make a website if you're a robot, or a bot, or some sort of spam technology. They want to make sure you're a real human, and this is one of the ways that we do this. I'm verifying my account here and just like that, my account has been verified. I don't believe I'm going to need my phone anymore, you're not going to need yours. Now, if you don't have a phone, you can always verify with a credit card. If you don't have a credit card, you can always use WP Engine, they give you free demo websites as well. You can build up your development website, your e-commerce website without having to pay for it. Now, we can see they want us to choose a plan. Basically they're giving us the option here for a starter site, a freelance site, agency, or custom. Truthfully, we don't want any of those. What we want is the bottom option here where it says, "create a demo site". But this is where I'm going to leave this video off for now. In the next video we're going to create our first demo site, and we're going to get it up and running. For now, what I would like you to do is, make sure you have a Flywheel account. Again, you don't need to put any money in. If they ask you for a credit card, you don't need to add your credit card. You can verify your account with a text message instead. Once you've verified your Flywheel account, go ahead and head on over to that next video, and I will meet you over there.
4. Setting up your website: Hello again. In this video we are going to be creating our websites. We have a flywheel account ready to go and this is leaving off from the last video. Now if you're just tuning in right now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click this logo up here in the top left and we're going to just see our regular account. Cool. We don't have any websites. Welcome to Flywheel, big poster, bunch of nice images. Now it's time to create our website. I type or not type, rather I click create a new website or create a new site. Then again, just scroll on down to the bottom. Create a demo site. This will allow us to create a free website. Here's where we can create a demo site and we can see we've got zero of one demo sites. Demo sites are free websites. The site owner is going to be me, the site name is going to be Kays T-shirts, and a randomly generated name.flywheelsites.com. This is going to be your temporary domain, so it's going to be your website.flywheelsites.com. What I'm going to put is ktshirts.flywheelsite.com. Just to make sure I spelled everything right because I don't think we can change that domain once we set this. Selecting your data center. Select wherever you are selling. For instance, if you live in the United States, but you are selling to people in Australia, select Australia. Or if you live in the European Union and you're selling to people in the United States, select the United States. I'm in Canada but I'm going to be selling to people in the United States. If you don't have an option like that, just pick whichever one is closest to your target audience. Add your WP-Admin username.. This is how we're going to log into our website. I'm just going to put in my username and my password. This could be a completely different password from your regular account, probably should be for security purposes as well. I'm just going to create this website. Nope, don't save that, but thank you for the offer Firefox. Now we're here and it says Kays T-shirts is being created. Now this point is going to take a couple of minutes to get up and ready. Because basically what Flywheel is saying is we have a lot of these servers, think of them as big boxes, and you've got this little tiny corner up here. This is your little demo sites. That's your little piece of the Internet. That's exactly what they're doing right now. They're provisioning a server for us or giving us a chunk of their hardware and a chunk of their software. This again only takes a couple of minutes. If it does take more than two minutes, maybe just go make yourself a tea or a coffee, come back and you should have an e-mail sitting in your inbox saying, "Hey, we're ready to go. " While this is running in the background, let's go explore Flywheel a little bit. We have a dashboard and yes, you can leave this page without interrupting anything. It's running in the background on their servers so whatever we do is not going to affect that. We can see here that we have a website mine is called Kays T-shirts. Yours is going to be, I don't know what yours is going to be, whatever you would've liked to call yours. If I click that title, it says this site is currently in privacy mode. To turn off complete your billing. We'll do that later. Collaborators, it's just me, but if you had, maybe you have a co-founder you can add your co-founder in here. Click '"Add collaborator" and put their e-mail address in and it'll just invite them automatically. It's actually really really nice. This is a service that's built for collaboration as well. We can enable SSL, which we are absolutely going to do. You can click on your site here, so let's click that. Usually, if you click that and your site is not up and running, it says, don't worry, your site is coming soon, but it looks like this is already here, so I'm going to close that and I'm going to skip on down to privacy mode. Privacy mode is a little password. This annoying little box that comes up, that's privacy mode. Basically, what this does is it keeps Google and other search engines out of here. We don't want our undeveloped websites to be on Google. We don't want people to be able to search for us yet, so they put a password on here. Now we don't know what this password is. It's not the one that we just made. It's a different one. In fact, if we scroll down in our dashboard to privacy mode, it says that our username is flywheel and our current password is early-sunshine. What I'm going to do is I'm going to change this. I'm going to change this to demo123. You can see I've done this before, demo123 and change. Now this change is going to take about a minute to propagate on the servers for security purposes and that's totally okay. If we go to our website here and we type in demo123 demo123 and this does not work for you right away, just give it a minute. If it doesn't work after about a minute or so, then maybe go and make sure that the username and the password that you set were the proper ones. There we go, it's just going to ask me to authenticate once more. This is a common thing. Here we go. We have a website. Just like that, we have a website up and running. Really all we had to do is click type a few things and we have a full website without needing any sort of web developers or technologists or anything like that. We did it ourselves. This is really powerful as entrepreneurs who want to sell things online. That's it for this video. In the next video, we're going to probably enable SSL and then we're going to eventually skip around the WordPress admin and take a look around and learn how to add themes and plug-ins and all that good stuff. The real fun part is coming up. What I want you to do is make sure that you have a website up and running on flywheel.com or WP Engine. Actually doesn't have to be flywheel. It could be really anywhere, but make sure you have a WordPress site up and running because we're going to be installing themes and SSL and all that stuff a little bit later. Once you've done that, head on over to the next video and I'll see you over there.
5. Enabling SSL/TLS for security: Hello and welcome back. In this video, we are going to enable SSL on a website and then we're going to force SSL. Now you can see behind me here on our dashboard in flywheel, we have this little green lock. Now I'm using Firefox, but this is pretty standard across most browsers these days. If you're using Chrome or Safari or some other browser, you're likely to see a little green lockup here whenever you see HTTPS, that means there is an SSL certificate or TLS certificate, that just means that your connection to and from the server is encrypted. So it's safe to put credit card numbers on there, for example. I'm just in my dashboard here and it says under domains, my site is not secure. I'm going to click enable SSL. It says, enable SSL for case t-shirts. So all this is good, we want the free one. That's totally okay. SSL are free now. Then simply just fill in your address, so I'm going to put mine in here. I'm from Edmonton Alberta organization. I'm going to put kays t-shirts, and my contact email is going to be ecomm.kalob@gmail.com. So let's just go and fill that in. I'm just going to make my screen a little bigger here. Then I click complete SSL setup. Now this is just going to take approximately about a minute. It says it'll be up in a Jiffy. Jiffy can be a minutes. It might possibly be able to five minutes. So maybe go make yourself a tea or coffee and just come back in a little bit. While we're waiting for this, let's just head on down to privacy mode. Now if you haven't already, you're going to want to change the privacy mode, username and password. The username is always flywheel by default and the password is always something different. I like to change this to something a lot more memorable. Demo one, two, three. Demo one, two, three. You may have seen me do this before in another video. I'm just going to make sure that this has absolutely changed. It just makes it so much easier to remember what's actually going on. When we open this page up and that little password dialogue pops up, which it doesn't because I've already viewed the site lately. But when that password dialogue pops up, you can just put in demo one, two, three. Demo one, two, three. You don't have to think about what that password is anymore, it's a temporary password, it doesn't need to be anything good. It just keeps Google out for now. So I've waited about a minute, so I'm just going to put HTTPS at the beginning of my URL here, and it's going to ask me for that username and password again, the one that I just put, demo one, two, three. demo one, two, three. Let's change or except that, now changed that. We've got that green lock. So that's good news, that's really good news. Now the next thing we want to do is we want to force SSL. We go into our advanced settings here, and due to forced HTTPS, let's turn that on. My page just went blurry there and it says force HTTP as being enabled. It's going take a little bit of time here, again, just because it has to go into your Wordpress settings and change it for you as well, which flywheel locks you out of by default for security purposes. This is taken care of all the security, all the code, all the settings. You don't have to do anything else. That says HTTPS is forced now, so let's go back to our overview and let's make sure this is working. Let's right-click on this and open in a new window or Incognito, it's going to ask me for the password again. That's demo one, two, three and demo one, two, three. Hit Enter. By default it has HTTPS enabled. That's all we had to do to enable SSL and force SSL or HTTPS on our website. Back in the day, this could take 30 minutes up to possibly a few hours. Now it's literally just click, click, click and you are good to go. You do not need to be a developer or a DevOps or Server Manager at all to do this, it is fantastic. Please make sure you have SSL enabled. You're going to absolutely need that, and once you have it enabled, head on over to the next video and I'll meet you over there.
6. Welcome to WordPress: Hello and welcome back. In the last video, we decided that we needed SSL, we enabled it, and we forced SSL or HTTPS on a website. That was a great thing to do. Next, what we need to do, is actually go and explore WordPress a little bit. I'm just going to open up this, and you can see that it automatically does HTTPS for me. Now, the thing with this video is if you're already familiar with WordPress, don't worry about watching this video. You can actually skip right past it and go onto the next one. If you've never used WordPress before, you're not super familiar with it, maybe stick around for a couple of minutes and just watch this video. Now to sign in, we're going to go to /WP-admin, and that just redirected me to this long URL here. Then you just put in your username and your password. I'm in my dashboard and or I'm in my WP admin rather, and it brings me immediately to my dashboard where you can see a bunch of information at a glance. Honestly, there's nothing useful here, so don't worry too much about this. If you have updates, if you have a theme, anything like that, which we actually do. We've got three themes already preinstalled with our WordPress setup. We're not going to be using these, so we're not going to update them, but your updates are available here. Posts are your blog posts. You can have Categories and Tags. Media is your images, your videos, your PDFs, anything like that, that's all going to be in there. Pages are your actual pages. This is, for example, your Sample Page, your homepage, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Contact Page, anything like that, not blog posts, but an actual page itself that has a different purpose. Comments are where people can come and comment. We are most likely going to have this disabled on a lot of websites. However, if you want people to be able to comment on your products, this is a good idea to keep this enabled. Appearance. There's a lot in here, so Appearance comes with Themes, Customize, Widgets, Menus, and Theme Editor. You can customize your theme by activating or deactivating any particular theme. We're going to add a new one in the coming lessons. You can Customize, you can add Widgets, you can customize your Menus. We're going to tinker around a little bit with customize and menus actually once we get a theme installed. We're going to have a little experience in there as well. Plugins. We're going to be installing a bunch of plugins. We currently have none. Plugins are basically just extensions of your website. That's really all it is. You have this base functionality called WordPress. Beyond that, if you want to do anything extra, you have these things called Plugins. There are millions of them, most of them are free. Users, there's only me. But if you have a co-founder or employees, you might want to create them a user accounts so they can go and edit some content. Tools, we're not going to talk about because we actually don't need to do really anything in there. A lot of our settings, we're not going to change either. A lot of our settings we're just going to keep as is. The settings that we do change, we're going to change in a future video. I think we'll do it when it's a little more relevant. But there are a bunch of settings in here such as Reading, Writing, General, Discussion, Permalinks, Privacy, login Attempts, things like that. Now, my advice to you is always go in, tinker around, just go and see what's going on in here. Honestly at this point, worst case scenario, if you mess something up and you are unsure about how to undo it, you can always just go back to fly wheel and you can delete this website. You haven't paid for it yet, so you can delete it. It will be instantly deleted and you can remake it, and it only takes maybe five minutes. That was probably the world's fastest walk around through a WordPress. Now you don't need to be super familiar, don't need to know all these different sections that I went over. That's totally okay if you're still somewhat unfamiliar with a lot of it. The reason for that is because we're going to get our hands dirty in there. We're going to be using Plugins, we're going to install a Custom Theme, we're going to Customize our Theme, we're going to be doing new things in there. Throughout the rest of this course, you're going to be getting a bunch of WordPress experience. Don't worry, don't be too concerned, if you don't know everything that I just went through. It's okay. Thank you for joining me on this video. There's nothing to do, once you are ready, head on over to the next one and I'll meet you over there.
7. Installing a nice theme : Hello and welcome back. In this video we are going to be installing a custom theme. Now, if you don't know how to do any of this, that's totally okay I'm going to walk you through all of this, and if at any point in time you get a little bit lost, as with any of these videos, just simply rewind it or ask a question down below. You can see that I'm inside of my getflywheel.com dashboard. My website is Kays T-Shirts, and I have an SSL website here so I'm just going to click that. Actually, I'm going to undo that, close that tab, and I'm just going to click WP Admin, and this will bring me straight to my WP admin, so that's a nice little shortcut there, and all it did was to bring me to my website.com/wp-admin. Just a nice little shortcut. Now we want to go over to Appearance and Themes, and we want to add a new theme. Now there's two ways we can do this, we can select a theme in here, we can search for theme online, or we can upload a theme. We want to upload a theme. Now the theme that we're going to upload is called Hestia and you can't actually search for it. I just don't know if you're going to get all the exact same goodies as when you download it, so I just want to make sure we're all on the same page, so select Hestia dot zip, which you can download from your project files, and click Install Now. Perfect, it said unpacking the package, installing the theme. Theme is installed successfully, let's activate. It looks like our theme is activated, and let's go up here, and just open this up in a new tab, and we have a brand new theme, so it looks a little bit better already, and it's not the greatest yet, but it does look pretty nice. Now that's all there is to installing a theme. Again, if you don't want to use this theme, just make sure you're using a Woo Commerce theme, or a Woo theme, and again, you can just go down to Themes, and click Add New, and you can search for any theme in here, so let's type in woo. Just close that woo commerce, and so this brings up a lot of different themes in here, 977, but the one we're going to be using in this course is called Hestia, and we're also going to be able to customize this nice background gradients, add a custom logo, and really brand our website to make it more you and less about me. Please make sure you have this theme uploaded, that's your exercise for this video. Once you have it uploaded head on over that next video, and we will start customizing it a little bit.
8. Website in a box: Already welcome back. In the last video, we uploaded a theme called Hestia. Please do not get rid of this notification, the one that you see just behind me and we need this link. This link, I'm actually going to copy this link. "Copy Link Location". If you ever lose it, you can always reference it down below. You're going to have to put in yourwebsite.flywheelsites.com slash whatever that link is, just that end part of it. That will bring you to a page that looks like this. This is our getting started. This theme is really nice because it walks us through everything we need. Now, the first thing you need to note is this absolutely has to be on SSL, HTTPS. If you do not have that, this might fail. Just be wary about that. Now, it comes with nine different themes. I'm actually just going to select the first one, because I really like the first one. But if there is another one you like, you can feel free to choose that one, and just click "Preview". I know the one I want and I'm just going to click "Import". It says, basically, we recommend backing up your website. We don't have a lot to backup, so it's not really valid right now. Due to copyright issues, they cannot give us all of the photos that we see in the preview of the original theme. Well, we didn't look at it anyways. Honestly, that's totally okay because we want to replace their images entirely, so that's totally cool. Which things do we want installed here? We want content customizer, widgets. Yep. WooCommerce? We definitely need that one installed. That is our e-commerce system. Without it, we don't have e-commerce. Contact forms by WPForms? No, let's get rid of that one. We're going to use something else because that is a premium plugin and I don't want you to have to pay for a simple contact form. That's nuts. Orbit by ThemeIsle. ThemeIsle is the company that makes the Hestia theme. It's really, really good. If you wanted to, you can always upgrade to the pro version, but the free version is fantastic. We're just going to be using the free version. Let's go ahead and click "Import" and it's going to install our plugins. This might just take a quick moment. There we go. Plugins are installed and it's importing some content now. It's going to build a bunch of pages for us, blog posts, things like that. Setting up the customizer, that's great. Importing widgets, everything is done. Again, if this does not work for you, make sure you're using HTTPS. I've noticed that this can often fail without that. Make sure you don't click "View Website" because that's going to take you away from this page. Make sure you just click "Add your own content". This is going to bring you to the customized page, where we can customize pretty much everything actually. It's really cool. All we really have to do is put our mouse over something and then click "Edit" and we can edit the whole thing. It's really nice. Again, you don't need to be a Web developer, you don't need to be a designer, you don't need any of those digital skills, you just need to be an entrepreneur who knows how to sell things, who knows how to make a website that can sell things to people and then drive traffic to your website. I'm going to exit out of this. This is our website. It looks pretty nice. We can see the "wpforms" thing. It doesn't work because I opted in to not use WPForms instead, we're going to use something called Ninja Forms. I believe is what we're going to end up using. Unless that doesn't suit our needs, then maybe we'll use something else. But yeah, we're just going to end up replacing that. This is all looking good. We've got a blog, we've got a shop, we've got two of everything in here. This is totally unnecessary and it's because I actually double-clicked that link, and that was my fault. If you only click the link once to import everything, then it will only import everything once, so that's good news there. Behind the scenes, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go and touch that up. I'm just going to go and delete the second blog page and the second shop page and things like that. That's all there really is to getting our theme setup. That's really cool. That did a lot for us. Now we need to go and get our plugin setup and we're going to do that in the next video.
9. Setting up WooCommerce: Hello, if you are still here, then awesome because we are getting into the needy-greedy of basically setting up your e-commerce website in this video. This is really the core foundation of everything that we are trying to learn in this course. So as you can see, we have this big congratulations thing. I'm going to close this now because we already clicked on or try one of our ready-to-use starter sites. We already did that, so I'm going to close this. That's closed. It says I have activated the Orbit Fox plug-in. Basically, just go to the dashboard, that's just a notification. That's cool. I'm going to close that one. That one actually brought me away. That's not at all what I wanted it to do. That was a little unexpected. I'm going to cancel thumbnail re-generation because that does not need to be running. Thumbnails will be made on the flier, so it's totally okay. The last thing we need, this is the important one, is "Welcome to WooCommerce". You're almost ready to start selling. This is the big one. This is where your company becomes a company. It's not just a website anymore. It is a money-making machine. We do not want to skip the setup. We want to run the setup wizard. This is just going to walk us through a few different things here. Where's your store based? My store is actually based in Canada. My address is going to be whatever my address is. Let's put 123, Edmonton street. City, Edmonton. State, Alberta. Postal code. I'm just going to make something up. I don't even know if that's a real postal code and but that looks like a Canadian postal code. That's what I'm putting in. I'm going to be selling not in Canadian $ because I want to sell it to the United States. So I'm going to put in USD. There we are. What types of products do I plan to sell to? Do I plan to sell both physical and digital products? Just physical products or just digital products? Now that's totally up to you. It might be both. It might be one or the other. For me, it's going to be both because I'm going to show you how to sell both physical and digital products. So it's going to be a two-for-one here. But for you, you might just be selling t-shirts or you might just be selling an online course or a PDF or digital knowledge, something like that. Choose whichever one's best for you. I'm going to sell both physical products and digital products, and my services will not be available in person. I do not want to help WooCommerce improve with usage tracking. They have enough and I don't think they need more data to be honest, they're already the biggest e-commerce giant in all of WordPress, so I don't think they really need anymore data, in my opinion. Are we going to be accepting payments through stripe and PayPal? Again, this is up to you. But all I'm going to do is say "Yes" to both. And you can sort of mess around with the settings that you need. The difference here is that PayPal will come straight out of your PayPal account. So it will create a little pay with PayPal button and then it'll ask people to sign into PayPal and take money straight out of their account. That's a really good option. A lot of people really trust PayPal. Stripe is credit cards. It's actually entering a credit card on the screen, and that's pretty important for people who don't have PayPal. I personally like paying with both options, but whenever I have the preference, I always choose PayPal because I like PayPal better. Also, PayPal will store my credit card information as well so they can pay with a credit card and I just have to login using my username and password. But again, you might want both. So we're going to activate both. "Collect payments for customers offline" No, we don't want to do that. We don't want checks. Don't send us cash, don't send anything like that. Again, that's totally up to you, but I don't like that option. Okay. Shipping. Because we're selling a physical product, is there a flat rate? Yes, there is a flat rate. I'm going to say there's a flat rate of $12.50 and locations not covered by your zones, how much is that going to cost? It's going to cost twice as much. It's going to cost $25. I'm going to print shipping labels at home, so I'm not going to use a third party called ShipStation. I'm not going to be using them. I'm going to print my own labels from home. If you don't know about printing labels or anything like that, you can always use ShipStation, try them out for free for 30 days. Because I'm selling to the US, they don't use kilograms, they use pounds, and they do not use centimeters, they use inches. So I'm going to tailor my measurements to that particular audience. Hit "Continue". Do I want Automated Taxes and Mailchimp and Facebook? I want the first two. I don't want Facebook pixels in here. If you do want it, you can always add it a little bit later by adding a custom plugin. I just know that this one tends to add a little bit of complexity to our setup and we don't really want complex right now. We want to get up and running, and then once we want to start maybe running some marketing campaigns on Facebook or Reddit or Twitter or Google, we can start adding plugins like that to sort of track our progress. For now. We don't need that. So "Continue". Actually, we probably didn't need the Mailchimp one either, but if you have a mailing list or if you want to build a mailing list, that's always a good idea to build one. Mailchimp is a great place to start. Jetpack. We are going to skip this one because that is a premium plug-in. Again, these premium things, I don't want you to have to pay for anything, that you don't have to pay for. If you want to, absolutely by all means go for it. But again, this is not one of those courses that I've designed for you to spend hundreds or thousands of $ to get a website up and running. I'm showing you that you can do this and have a perfectly fine website, a great website actually, because this looks really nice for selling products online without all these premium options. It's very, very inexpensive to do these days. All right. You are ready to start selling. Basically, do I want to sign up for their e-mails? You know what, honestly, yeah, WooCommerce is really, really good. I do want to be on their list, especially if there's any sort of security fly and I need to immediately upgrade. So yes, I'm going to do that. Make sure I'm not a robot. Then I click "Subscribe" [inaudible]. I'm subscribed. Now I can create a product, import products, visit the dashboard, review settings or view and customize. A lot of options in here to be honest. So let's just go ahead and create our first product. Now it's at this point in time where we're about to create our first product and we're going to create a t-shirt to start. It's a physical t-shirt. We're not going to get into that right now in this video, we're actually going to move that into the next video because there's a lot of options that we need to go through. For now, what I would like you to do is, I would like you to make sure that you have all these plugins setup. If you ever go into your plugins settings here, just scroll on down and we can see we have a bunch of plugins in here. Just make sure you have all of these ones installed and operational. Again, all of this comes with the theme that's downloadable on your project files. So don't forget, you can always download that directly. Once you are good to go, head on over to the next video and let's create our first physical product.
10. Customizing your website : Hello and welcome back. In our last lesson, we set up our e-commerce site with all the different settings and shipping prices and Stripe and PayPal, we chose the plugins we wanted to use and all that good stuff. In this one, we are going to customize our site a little bit. So you can see here just behind me, we have this website and it looks pretty good, actually, like right out of the box, this is a big win for a lot of people, but it's not quite customized to what you want it to be. So let's go and change that logo. Maybe let's change some of the color. So if we go over to the blog, yeah, we can see there is a gradient in there. So let's go and do a little bit of exploring here. So in my WP admin, which if you don't know how to get there, you can go to your Flywheel account and simply click on WP admin and it will bring it there for you. Let's go into appearance and what we've got Hestia options. So let's see what the first one is in here. Useful plugins, libraries, free vs pro. Yeah, there we are. We want to go to the customizer, but we can also go to appearance and then just customize. Now the nice thing about the WordPress customizer is you can see these little icons here. You can click anywhere and change it. So let's change this title. Let's change this to Kay's T-shirts. You could change that to whatever you like it to be. Beautiful, elegantly threaded, simple t-shirts, something like that. See more and that button is just going to go to the shop. So I'm going to type in slash shop because that's going to be that link there. What else we have in here? We've got some extra stuff. We have different layouts, and this is pretty cool. So you can change the layout from left to right, center, things like that. I'm going to keep it centered because I want it to be nice and in the middle, probably change that background image, but I don't actually have one available at the moment, not off hand. But you can always go to pixels.com and pick out a royalty-free image there. What I'm going to do here is just go back and back again. Let's go to site identity. Now, site identity is where this logo lives. So let's go and select a logo. I currently don't have one, so let's go and upload a logo. Let's upload the light version. Let's see how this looks. Now, I just created a logo by going onto Google and typing in free logo generator. I think Shopify is the one I ended up using, was completely free. They wanted my email address, which was a little bit annoying, but it's a free logo and really I would just use it to get inspired, and then, if you have the money or you have the skills, or you have a friend that can do it for you, maybe get a professional logo done. But just as a heads up, please don't spend too much money on a logo because logos are easily replaced. I'm going to crop this image because it was too big and WordPress said it needs to be a different size, so it's cropped. That is a tiny logo. So I can maybe get someone to actually do this, or if you have the skills to do it, that's great. If you are a member of skillshare.com, you can actually go and learn how to make logos. There's tons of courses out there. Lots of them are really, really high quality. You can learn it on your own already. My tagline here is going to be simple t-shirts. I can change the favicon. The favicon is that little icon that you see in your tab there. You can totally change that. I don't actually have one ready for this either, not propped. Because again, I'm just using a fake company here. So I'm not actually going all in and creating a full company. But if you have one, you could probably just even just take that little bug there that, that little shape and turn it into a 512 by 512 pixel image and then just upload it. We can actually see there that is somewhat of a problem. So I'm going to change that logo and I'm going to add a dark logo. Dark logo. It is uploading real slow. I'm going to select this one. Yeah, prop please. So I have a problem here. It doesn't look good on dark and it doesn't look good on white. What do we do here? Well, I'm going to have to leave this up to you because I don't know what your logo is going to be, but I'm going to stick with this one for now, and hopefully that suits me best. But I mean, again, this really demonstrates how easy it is to change a logo. Let's change that and let's click on our blog. We can see that we have a block here. So let's go and see if we can find some of this gradient. It can be anywhere color; background color, accent color. It's probably not it. Maybe it is, I don't actually know. Typography, definitely not typography. Background image, probably not in appearance then or maybe it is. I could be going too fast and just skipping over it. But here's the thing with this section is you're going to want to spend a lot of time in your customizer. The reason you want to, is because you want it to look nice for your audience and you want it to be tailored to you. You want it to look like you also use a custom logo, use custom colors. You can switch up button colors and text colors and font faces, typefaces, things like that. Make it you. So right now this looks a lot like me, and actually it looks a lot like default Hestia theme, which is not bad at all. But I think there's a better way, where you can customize it. So you still have all the goodies and you got a nice gradient here from a pink to another pink or blue to a green, Something like that. I think you should really take that opportunity and customize the sites to be whatever you want it to be, so it shows your colors. So I'm just going go back into appearance here and then to colors. Let's see what happens when I change his accent color. So did that change that color? Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. Doesn't seem to be doing a whole lot here. So let's just go with default. Background image. We could change a better background images. So if we wanted to background image back here instead of a gradient, we could do that. Button colors. We can change the padding and stuff. That's fantastic. General settings and different types of layouts. That's cool. Where do we want this to go? Blog settings, perhaps, categories. But all stuff in here. Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to cover all of this just because there's so much and you can even tell that even I'm getting a little overwhelmed with all of this. But again, just spend a lot of time in here and just get to really know this. The nice thing about this too is with any WordPress website, is every WordPress website comes with this customizer. So whether you use this theme or another theme, or you decide one day that you want to be a developer and work on WordPress websites. This tool is readily available to you on every theme. So I'm not actually going to spend any more time trying to customize this because I don't want to waste your time in this video, but I definitely know that the gradient setting is in there. Don't forget, you can change your logo, you can change basically everything of your entire website. So go ahead and upload a new logo, generate a new logo type in Google free logo generator. Don't pay for it, just make a free one for now. Maybe get some inspiration from some of the free ones that are created for you. Because you might see something that you like. You never know. Upload that logo. Mine that one's just bad, I'm going to have to fix that. Then, you now, once you are fairly happy with your website, share it with us, grab that URL. So it's going to be yourwebsite.flywheelsites.com and share it down below. Don't forget to give us the password. That Demo123. Don't forget to give us that privacy password so that we can go and check it out. So share it down below. Then the second thing is when you are done and you're happy, head on over to that next video and I'll meet you over there.
11. Adding a physical product: Hey, welcome back. In the last video, we got a Woo Commerce Setup. We got a bunch of plug-ins setup and installed. In this video we're going to create our first physical product. We immediately see that we have PayPal Checkout notification, we've got a Woo Commerce Strait notification. We have a ship station notification. Honestly, I'm just going to get rid of these, because these are settings that we can adjust later. Let's go ahead and just close all of these. Dismissed. What I'm going to do is go to HTTPS. Make sure I'm always on the HTTPS site. We can see I'm on a new product page. All I did was go to products and then new. Add new. We're going to walk through creating a product right now. First is your product name. That's just whatever your name is. Maybe it's a white T-shirt. Then your product description, how white is the t-shirt? How big is it? What product is it made out of? What material is it made out of? It's really all that description. Maybe keep it somewhat short. Choose your product type? Is this a simple product, group product, external affiliate product, variable product? We're going to just stick with the simple product for now. We're not going to get into the world of affiliates, and variables and things like that. We're going to keep this nice and simple for the time being. Is this a virtual product? We can select if this is a virtual product or not, right here. Is this a downloadable product? Maybe it is, maybe it's not. I don't think you can download a T-shirts. Your regular price, your sale price, your products, short description. Whatever your short description should be, this one should be fairly short I would think. Product images. You can select your product image in here. A picture of someone wearing a nice T-shirt, for instance. Product tags, you can add different tags. Is it a t-shirt? Is it a different type of shirt? Maybe you expanded past shirts, and you're no longer just a shirt company. Maybe you also sell jeans, and hoodies, and maybe suits. Who knows? This is where you would put those tags. Categories. We have a fashion popular trending accessories and uncategorized. Maybe we'll create a new category in there, because we don't really want any of them. Fashion is far too broad for t-shirts. Maybe we just want some category in there called t-shirts or maybe just white for a white t-shirt. Then up here we have publish our product. We can publish the page. We can save a draft and we can always preview it as well, which is nice. We'll get into all of this very shortly. The first thing we need to do here is we need to add a product name. Let's go ahead and call this white T-shirt. Preferably spelled right. In here is the main description and you can see it just generated a link for us. It's flywheelsites.com or ktshirts.flywheel sites.com/products/white-t-shirt. If you wanted to change that you could change that as well. Here's the main description for a white t-shirt. I'm not going to fill that out too much, because honestly, that's going to be pretty boring, just watching me fill out things like that. Let's add a price. How much is this price? This shirt is going to be, generally it's 9.99, so it's a $10 shirt. The sale price is going to be 6.99 because I ordered far too many of them and honestly, they're taking up a place in my apartment and I need to get rid of them. They're taking up room in my basement, and I want to make room for new inventory that's selling a little bit better. Tax status. Taxable, it should probably be taxable. Your tax class, reduced rates, standard rate. Let's go with the standard rate. If you're not sure what these are, you can always hover over that little question mark. Then, for instance, this one says, choose a class tax for this product. Tax classes are used to apply different tax rates specific to certain types of product. For instance, if you were selling, what would be something that might be tax a little bit higher? Chemicals. If you were selling cleaner, for instance, you might have a different tax rate, because there are environmental fees. Inventory. Let's give this a skew. Let's give this white t-shirt and it's a terrible skew. Let's call it white t-shirt 001. Manage stock at a product level. How much do we have? We have a 100 of these. Allow back orders? No. Low stock threshold. When is Woo Commerce going to say, "Hey Caleb, when are you out of stock or when are you about to be able to stock or when should you may be considered getting more stock.'' I'm going to say 50 percent. This is not a percent, this is 50 out of a 100, that just happens to be that 50 percent. Shipping. How much does a shirt weigh? It's going to be, I don't know, one-pound. We just do one. Length. I actually have no idea about shirt length. I'm just going to put some numbers in here. If they are totally wrong and you know, better, just try to ignore these terrible numbers. The width is going to be, I don't know, 34. I don't know. A shipping class. We don't have a shipping class linked products, we don't need any upsells or cross cells. Attributes. We can add a custom attribute if we wanted to. We could just simply add this in here. We're not going to get into that purchase note menu order. We could do all things in here. Again, we're not going to get into the complexities of all of this, because we're going to be here for a long time. I do highly recommend checking out more about this. Feel free to Google it. Feel free to just click around, and see what happens when you add a certain field. Then preview your page, which you can always do by clicking preview. Here we can see we have a white t-shirt, 9.99, it's on sale for 6.99. I've got a 100 in stock. I can add it to cart. I've got a description. This is the main description for the t-shirt. Some additional information. It's one pound, 34 by 34 by 34, and there are 0 reviews. That's just a preview and nothing fantastic, just a regular preview. Now, we need a short description. This is a short description in here, and we're just going to use this as an example to show you what this looks like a little bit later. We also need a product image. Now I don't actually have an image of somebody wearing a t-shirt. What I'm going to do is open up pixels.com. This is just a royalty free image website, and I'm just going to type in t-shirt. Let's go with this guy. That's a nice shirt. Free download. I probably, don't need any larger than medium image. I'm just going to download this photo. Then I can go to my product image. I went a little faster, I apologize about that. Under product image you can click, set product image. Select your file. I just selected the image that I had downloaded from pixels.com. There it is, and so we can change this title. Let's just call this, I don't know, t-Shirt number 1. Set product image. We got a product image. Do we want a product gallery? We could add several images in here, so let's click that one, and let's maybe click, there's not really another one of a t-shirt in here. Let's just put a little sample one in here. Let's put that one in there. I guess we can't put this one in here, because it didn't let me. No, it did. There we go. We've got all three in there. Let's preview our page now. Now it's going to look a little bit better. Look at that. Now, we have the main image, and we've got some of this in here. This one is actually just small, because the image itself is not bigger than this. We've got these two in here. I'm going to actually get rid of those, because they don't look good. Then when I'm done, I'm just going to click publish. That is how we create our first physical product. Now if we go back to our website, and click up in our logo area, and we just scroll down to where it says products. We have an uncategorized white t-shirt product that's on sale for $7. Let's go and create a new category here. Create a new category. Let's call this t-shirts. It does not need a parental category. Add a new category. It's selected and let's update. Let's go back to our homepage, refresh and this will no longer say uncategorized. This will now say T-shirts, perfect. We can now click into this. We can click T-shirts. We can see all the T-shirts product category says t-shirts in here. It's going to show all of our T-shirts for that category. The categories are working well. This is working well to add to cart is really easy. I just want to add one to my cart. I've got one white T-shirt in my cart. I can go to my cart, and I can check out. Now, for whatever reason this says it's shipping to the United Kingdom. I probably just set that up wrong. It's probably supposed to be Canada or the United States shipping to AB. That's probably supposed to Canada. You can change your address and stuff in there as well. You can check it with PayPal or you can proceed to check out. Let's just fill this out. I don't think I did that right. I hope that's not someone's real postal code by the way. Then we can see we can pay with PayPal. Basically, your checkout is a regular checkout. It even has the regular flat fee shipping rate, because it's out of country. That is how we create a physical product. Nice and easy. Now if we ever wanted to, we could go and view all of our products in our admin. We could delete these other ones if we wanted to. We can also duplicate one. If you have the exact same thing that you want to sell in red and maybe the only thing you want to change is the image. You want to show someone wearing a red T-shirt instead of a white T-shirt. You could do that and just click duplicate. That's the biggest thing here. Again, I just want to really stress or emphasize that there are a lot of different options in here. I really do recommend going through these, and learning them. If you're going to learn how to sell online. It is a good idea to get familiar with different types of inventory, shipping different linked products. If you're going to up-sell, cross-sell things like that, because you never know when someone's buying a white shirt and hey, maybe they also want white socks with it. You never know. Maybe they have a three pack of white shirts, but maybe they also want a five pack of white shirts as a gift. Who knows? You just don't know what your customers always want. It's good to give them upsell and cross-sell options. Your exercise for this video is to create a physical product, and just get it up and running. Feel free to grab an image from pixels.com. There are royalty-free images in there. Then once you actually have a real product to sell, make sure you're using your own images instead of, using someone else's images. That's always safe way to just ensure that your quality looks a lot better than what other people can provide. Create the physical product. Once you've done that, I'll see you in the next video and we'll create a digital product.
12. Adding a digital product: Hello and welcome back in the last couple of videos because that section was rather long. We created a physical product and in this video, we are going to create a digital product. This one should be relatively short because we already learnt the ins and outs of creating a product. A digital product is the same thing as a physical product, but actually has less details because really all you need to do is upload a particular file really or link even. Let's go to our products and you can see that just behind me and I'll just move out of the way here. I'm in my dashboard and I go to products and then all products. Let's go ahead at the top and click, "Add new." We're going to create a new product and this is going to be called T-Shirt Maintainability. How to take care of your t-shirts. Something like that. I'm going to put that in the short description. The price for this one is going to be $3.99 and it will not be on sale. This is a virtual product. You can actually see that I have some of the options swap in and out of here. It's a virtual product, no longer needs shipping, it's a downloadable product and we just simply need to add a file. Let's add a file in here. Let's choose that file. We need to upload a new file. I just go into my Downloads and I have this file called sample.pdf. This sample.pdf file actually has nothing to do with shirts. I just found a sample.pdf file on the internet. But for your product, make sure you have a proper PDF or a proper file. Because people are going to eventually pay for it and if they pay $4 for something that's inaccurate, that could hurt your company and you don't want that at all. All right, so that's upload it and insert file. File name is going to be called, Taking care of your t-shirts. Download limit. Maybe you're running a Facebook campaign and you said, "I actually only want 100 people to get this at $4." There's a 100 downloads, this is like your digital stock, your digital inventory, it downloads expiry. Maybe you're going to say people need to download these before next weekend. Maybe this is a Cinco de Mayo or Christmas promotion, or maybe a birthday promotion. Who knows what it is. It could be really anything and you can add a download expiry date. I'm not going to do that in this example though. One more thing that I'm going to do is, I'm going to add an image of a book. Let's add this one. This is a nice image. Let's download a medium-size photo. I'm going to set this product image now. This is going to ask me to basically upload a new photo. I select my photo and it's going to take a second because it's going to create a bunch of thumbnails for us. Let's just call that book, set product image. Let's go preview this. Shirt maintainability, nice. So it's got a picture of a book in here the description, "How to take care of your shirts." It's $4 or $3.99. You can add this to your cart as well. You can apparently add as many as you like. There's probably a setting in there which I'm going to leave in your hands to figure out how to disable, because it's a digital product and you probably shouldn't have too many in their. Download limit, maybe it's just one. Lets say we're happy with this. No. Lets put this in the category of t-shirts. Let's also put this in the category of digital. Let's click "Publish." Probably close down a couple of these tabs here and let's click that link. Here we can see we've got everything is looking good. Related products because it's in the same category and is already on sale, it's handling that for us. Go back to our homepage, we're going to see it in here and look at that, t-shirt maintainability and a white t-shirt. Now we have two products and there we've had a physical product and a digital product. If your website, if your e-commerce store is going to have a digital product, definitely go and add one now. It could even just be a sample one. Don't forget that all of this is changeable. Right now Google is not going to index your website, it's not going to save it. Google can't even actually really access your website because of that initial password that we put on it. You are safe to experiment to your heart's content here. Your exercise for this video is, if you have any digital products that you want to sell, make sure you set up a product now. To this point you probably have a physical or a digital product. I would highly recommend just sharing your progress down below, if you want feedback on a certain image to use or maybe certain wording or copyrighting. Don't forget, we are creating an e-commerce community. You can always check down below for other people's inspiration, the things that they're asking you about, you can put your own questions in there. This is a safe space. Nobody is going to be shamed for asking any question at all, and I will help you as much as I possibly can. Always feel free to share your progress down below. Once you have a physical or digital product ready to go on your website, head on over to that next video and we will tackle our next step.
13. Opening your communication line: Hello and welcome back. In this video we're going to be adding a contact form, now, when we set up WooCommerce, not WooCommerce I guess. When we set up this theme, it said, "Hey, do you want WP forms?" We said, "No, we don't want that." That's because that's a premium plugin and I don't want you paying for something as simple as people trying to contact you. That doesn't make sense to me. What makes sense to me is a free plugin that does everything you need that will take care of all of your contact form needs. The reason we're going to add a contact form is because, and you can actually see up here is where I'm going to want to put that, a contact form is a great way for people to contact you, whether it's for support because they just bought a product from you, or maybe it's because they're considering buying a product from you, or maybe it's a teacher buying 30 t-shirts for their kids or Girl Guides or something like that, who knows what the situation is. But they want to reach out to you for some additional information anyways, and if you don't have that line open, people can't buy from you. So let's go ahead and open up our communication line. Under plugins, we can see we've got all these notifications here, let's go to add in new plugin, and we want to search in here for Ninja Forms. It's this first one here that says Ninja Forms, I'll just make that a tad bigger here. Install now, just a moment. Now, we click Activate, and we're going to see a new option right in here. Ninja Forms, there it is. Would I like to make Ninja Forms better? Yes, please. Occasionally some emails, no I don't want that. You might want that, I don't. Now, by default, Ninja Forms comes with a contact form, or a contact me form, and if we click into this, it's actually super easy to edit this, we can click on any part, click that little gear icon, and we can change all of it. Now, there are again a lot of settings in here, and this plugin will do basically everything you need, anything you can think of, it will do it. Now, I don't actually want to go and customize this, although you might want to. So if you want to please feel free to spend a little bit of time in here, there's no pressure to make a beautiful form or anything, it just needs to be a functional form. People want to contact you, they don't want to be wowed when they contact you. I'm going to leave this page because it's already built, and you can see under the short code column, that it gives us ninja_form id=1. I'm just going to select that and copy it. Now, I want to create a new page, so pages go to, add New, and I'm going to call this page, contact. Now, why is that not showing up for me? Let's do a quick preview here. Conact, I spelled that wrong. For some reason, this color is not showing up the way it is meant to, and that is very interesting. So what I'm going to do is save this and I'm just going to go back. This might be a bug with either, WordPress or the theme itself. Go to All Pages, where is contact? We just made it, let's do a search in here, contact. It's not even in there. Where did you go? It is our latest draft, where are you? There you are, it's called conact again because I spelled it funny. So we have a title that we can put in here, does it even matter really too much we want in there. We actually just want this little icon here, and we want this to say Ninja Form. We can actually even just select it, which is really nice and it will pre-populate just like that. The other way of doing that is if you wanted to add another section, you could add a short code, and that short code is added down here and just simply paste that short code in there, it will give you the exact same output either way. I'm going to remove this block, and what do we want in here? Add a title, contact, I don't know why that's not showing up. Yeah, you can see it there contact, but that is a very hard to see font. Add heading, there we goes see contact. So let's just grab this and move this guy all the way up, there we go. That didn't work at all, let's click that button. There we go, that rearranges it. Now, let's click preview, and we've got to contact in here, contact title, that's our actual title in here. So let's take a look at this contact title, and when I click Preview, it will change that title for me, just like that. So you can put any title in there if you wanted to. Let's add another field, you can add a paragraph. Please contact us about any thing you like, we're open 24/7, because we're on the internet, preview. Cool. So we've got a contact page, contact title, we got a little paragraph and our form, and the nice thing about Ninja Forms is it comes with a bunch of instant validation. If I select the name field and then I leave, it's like, "Oh, this is a required field." What about e-mail? Oh, this is a required field and it goes on and on and on. I'm just going to put test in here, my email is going to be ecomm.kalob@gmail.com, and hello world, as my test message. So I just made that bigger, now I'm going to hit "Submit". Processing, cool, We've got a contact form in there, and let's go to Ninja Forms, and then we can see our submissions. Now, at first this is going to be a little alarming, it looks like there's nothing in there, but that's actually inaccurate. We just need to select a form, so let's select contact me, and we can see in here we've got a name and e-mail and a message. The next thing you're going to want to do is, you're going to want to sign into your e-mail, which I have here, and we can actually see that, oh no, I don't have an e-mail in there. Always check your spam. For whatever reason, WordPress is notoriously bad for sending e-mails that go straight to spam, so just select both of these and say, "No, these are not spam. These are actually from my website, stop marking them as spam." Submission Confirmation, so this is confirmation here and we get a new message here. The nice thing is all you have to do, is click reply and it will reply to the right address for you. So it takes care of all the nitty gritty technical details behind the scenes for you. You don't have to worry about a single thing. Just again, make sure you always check that spam folder, over time it gets better with your website, and really this only affects you, because people are trying to contact you, you're not trying to contact them. So you don't have to worry about your e-mails going into spam at this point, you just have to worry about them trying to contact you and hitting your spam. That's all there is to creating a Ninja Form. Now, if you wanted to add a new one, you could add a brand new Ninja Form, and it will give you a bunch of different options here, contact us, create a post, collect feedback, a blank forms, you can customize it, import, export settings, it has all settings in here as well. So don't forget, you can always go and check out all of these. Now, there's one last thing we have to do, in our website we have no way of getting to this contact page at all, so let's go into appearance, and let's go into Menus, there you are. We want to select the top default, let's select the main menu, primary menu, click select. Let's get rid of some of these because these are really annoying, get out of here, we don't want to see them anymore. So select main menu, primary menu, hit "Select" if you haven't already, and let's go down here and let's find our page, where is our page? Search for contact, no results, what happened here? Let's go back to our pages, we need to edit something on our page contact, it's because it's not published, silly Caleb. That was my fault. So let's go ahead and publish our page. Yeah, we're ready to publish. Now, come back here, hit "Refresh". I apologize about that one, I totally skipped over that step, that's an important step too. Hit "Contact", so just select that little check box, add to Menu. You can rearrange this, so I want this one to be the first one. Save menu, and then let's go and refresh our page. You will see up here it says contact. Cool. That brings us to our contact page. Now, there's one more setting I want to change because this page ID is disgusting. WordPress comes with this by default, and I absolutely dislike that to the ends degree. It's bad for search engines, it's bad for people, nobody's going to remember that number. So what we're going to do is go into your settings, permalinks, and let's just change that to post name, scroll down, hit "Save Changes", refresh your page and this will automatically go to contact. There we go, this makes a lot more sense. We did a lot in this video. The primary thing that I would like you to do is make sure you have some contact form plugin, whether it's Ninja Forms or Contact Form 7 or WPForms. I like Ninja Forms because it gives you everything, gives you the best of all worlds for free, but if you would rather use WPForms, go for it, if you'd rather use Contact Form 7, you also need Flamingo to save all of your form submissions, or you can just use Ninja forms like I did and just have everything up and running almost instantaneously. Once you have a contact form plugin, that will be enough to move on to the next lesson and I'll meet you over there.
14. Adjusting payment settings: In this video we need to talk about something very important, and that is our payment settings. At this point in time, you can actually see just behind me here, that I'm in my flywheel dashboard and I just want to click WP admin, and we can get rid of that one if that's showing up for you again and we can get rid of that one and we can get rid of that one. Let's get rid of that one and cancel a thumbnail regeneration. That's just getting rid of notifications that has nothing to do with this particular lesson. What we want to do is go into WooCommerce and then go into our setting. These settings are really important. We have general settings, product settings, tax settings, shipping, payments, accounts and privacy, e-mails integration and advanced. In this particular lesson, we are only talking about payments. You can see that there are tons of different supported payments in here. The only two that we've really need, PayPal Checkout and Stripe, which you can see are already enabled. I'm going to tap on Manage PayPal Checkout. Do we want this enabled? Yes. Do we want the title to be PayPal share? We can change the description in here. Account settings, environment, live or sandbox. When you set up a PayPal account, you're going to have two options you can have live or sandbox. Sandbox is testing. API credentials, this will take care of everything for you. All you need to do is click this link and then login with your PayPal account. Just put that stuff in there and it will help you out. If you don't want to do that, you can go through the manual API credential input, and WooCommerce will walk you through all of that. For PayPal, you're going to want to select a PayPal image, a different header. These are like when you check out with PayPal on PayPal.com, it can still show your branding on there. Page style, landing page. Do you want it to be the billing(non PayPal account) or the login(PayPal account login). Honestly, a lot of these defaults are probably perfectly fine. There's not a whole lot we really want to change in here but if you wanted to, you absolutely could. Now I'm not going to go through every single setting in here just because there are so many of them but what I would definitely recommend is if you were interested in the whole PayPal thing, just start Googling around, and I know that doesn't sound like a great thing to do, but there's so much support and there are so many answers and so many questions about WooCommerce and PayPal and Stripe already because we are using a plug-in that is a world renowned plugin, it's probably the world's number one E-Commerce Plugin. Everybody's using it and everybody has had questions and everybody has had some answer to some degree. There's a lot of support out there than what I can provide in a single video, but just feel free to go and do that. Now if you get really lost after doing a little bit of Googling, definitely feel free to ask in the section down below, and I'll be happy to help out as best as I can. There again, there are a lot of different settings in here, and that's just PayPal. The other one we have in here was Stripe. If I go to manage Stripe, do we want to enable? Yes. Title? Credit card. What Stripe does is, instead of signing into Stripe.com, which is what PayPal does, PayPal makes you sign in. Stripes does actually, you can add credit cards directly to your website, which is a really, really cool feature. We actually needed SSL enabled in order to use this, otherwise stripe will lock you out and say, "Your website is not secure at all." You can change your description. You can enable and disable test mode. Now here's a big one, is when you have test mode on, you have different API keys which you can get from Stripe directly. When you disable test mode, you will have a live publishable key. These are API keys, and again, you can get these straight from your Stripe account. Stripe and PayPal or both free and they will only take money from you per transaction, which is somewhere around 2.9 percent plus 30 cent each depends on your country though, but it's somewhere around there. Again, there are a lot of different options in here, not as many as PayPal, but there are quite a few. If you ever get stuck with setting up your web hook, don't forget, you can always leave a comment down below or you can simply Google it for a faster, probably much faster answer from someone who has already experienced the same problem that you might be going through. Then you have all these other WordPress settings or these WooCommerce settings rather. Make sure you take the time to go through these because these are the settings that are essential to running your e-commerce business and without these settings, you may or may not get the results that you're expecting. Spend some time in here, go through all your settings, set up your tax, your shipping, your products, your general, all that good stuff. Once you are done with that, and in the meantime, you might need to create a Stripe account and a PayPal account. But once you are done with all of that head on over that next video and we will launch this website. We'll get this up and running so that you can actually start selling and start making some money. Thanks for joining me in this video and I'll meet you in the next one.
15. Launching your site : Already, it is time. We have done a lot of work on a website. Hopefully you've really customized your website and you're happy with it. At this point, if you are happy with it, let's go ahead and launch the website. Now, launching a website on flywheel.com or actually I believe it's getflywheel.com or [inaudible] or really any WordPress hosted website is really, really, really simple. So as you can see here, I just have my dashboard loaded up. So I'm on app.get flywheel.com and I'm going to click into my website. To launch my website, even if we go down to privacy mode, you can see here that it says, I need to complete billing to turn off privacy mode, so I can't turn that off. Really all we have to do is complete our billing. Now it's at this point that we are going to actually be launching our website. So if you are happy with it, then complete your billing now. If you are not happy with it yet and you think there's a little more work to do then by all means, continue working on your website and don't pay for it until you absolutely have to. The reason I'm saying that is because as soon as you complete your billing, you will be charged immediately. So I'm going to be paying for my own website. But if you are an agency or would like to be an agency, you can make a website on behalf of someone and give their billing information. So I'll be paying on my own here. The plan I want to choose is the Starter plan. So always start with the smallest possible plan. You don't know if you're going to have a 100,000 visits a month. You don't know if you're going to need 20 gigs of bandwidth. You don't know any of these things yet. Those are unknown variables. So always start at the lowest one and you can always upgrade later. So I selected the Starter plan. If you are optimistic about where you're going with this, you can pay annually, you'll save a couple bucks there, or you can pay monthly. So if you want to give us like a six month trial and you're not entirely certain if this is actually going to work out the way you think it's going to work out. That's okay to have some healthy skepticism or criticism there. You can pay monthly for $25 a month. Now, I'm going to be honest, I don't know if that's in Canadian dollars or US dollars because last week this said 17, but I was also on an American connection whereas this week I'm on Canadian soil and it says $25. So this price may actually be different for you depending on the country, it just doesn't tell me which currency it's in. So you can select monthly. If you have a discount, you can apply it. You might want to go and do a little quick Google to see if there's any promotions going on. It's always a good idea to look for a promotion. If you can save 10 percent, you can save 10 percent. If you can say 50 percent, that's great. That means you are getting six months or years worth of service for six months or three months or half the time really. So always look for a discount code. Then it's going to take you to your payment method type. Now it's going to ask us for one of two types of payments. We can either, and a lot like our website, pay with a credit card or pay with stripe. Either one is totally fine. So if you want to pay with a credit card, just simply select credit card and put in your credit card information and you will be good to go. Otherwise, if you want to pay with PayPal, you can just simply pay with PayPal and then it will log into your PayPal and automatically deduct money from your account. So I'm going to let you choose whichever path you want to take here. I'm just going to assume that you put in a credit card number. Then once you have all done that scroll on down to the bottom of the page, the payment page here, just scroll on down to the bottom, click "Pay Now" and you will be ready to go. So I'm not actually going to pay now because I'm not done tweaking my website. I'm probably going to spend another day or two on it fixing up some of the products, fixing at the logo, fixing up a bunch of copyrighting and stuff on there. Once I've done that, I will be able to well, complete my billing, but I can also turn off privacy mode. Now, privacy mode again is that a little annoying pop-up, so maybe it'll show up here. Yeah, this thing, this is privacy mode. You can't give that to people you don't know on the Internet because no one's going to know it. You aren't going to know who is going to be accessing your website. So we need to get rid of this. So once you have completed your billing, turn off privacy mode, and you will be able to give people your link. So the link that I'm using is ktshirts.flywheelsites.com. I can give people that link and away we go. Now, don't forget when you launch, you need to change your stripe API key. So you want to use your live keys. You want to change your PayPal mode to live mode out of sandbox mode, those are very, very important. Otherwise, people are going to be sending you money that doesn't actually exist and you won't actually get paid. Now there's one last thing to keep in mind here is that your website is still going to be a sub-domain of flywheelsites.com. So it's going to be in this case, ktshirts.flywheelsites.com. Now I own like 30 different domains and you might have a bunch of different domains as well. But if you don't, you can always go to Google domains if that's available in your country, and I would highly suggest using that one, or you can go to GoDaddy.com and buy a domain name there. Then you can basically just point that, that domain over here, click "Add a domain", make it your primary one. It's going to take a few minutes to update depending on your DNS. Then once that's done, you can use your own domain name. So for instance, I could use kalebtaulien.com, kaleb.io, codingforeverybody.com, and wagtail.com. Those are just four of the domains that I own and I could register that in there. Now we're not going to go through that technical detail because that gets a little bit out of scope for this course. However, if that is something you want and I would highly recommend it, simply hop on Google and type in flywheel. In fact, I'll do it right now: flywheel dns support. I didn't even spell it right, but Google doesn't care. How to set up your DNS on GoDaddy. Here's a good one, because I had mentioned GoDaddy. So this will walk you through the entire thing, everything you need to do in here. So that's really, really important. If you don't want to use GoDaddy, and this is my personal preference but if you can avoid using GoDaddy, don't use GoDaddy. They are a little bit expensive and they don't give you very much these days. Whereas if you use domains.google.com, I think, what is it? Google domains. No, that they have their own top-level domain, it's domains.google. You can get your own domain through here for probably $7 a month. You can get a.com, something like that. D-dos protection, all sorts of good stuff, has everything that GoDaddy offers. It's cheaper, it's better, hooks into your Google Suite gives you a free email address as well that you can use so you don't have to pay for email address. I would highly recommend using Google domains. So again, that's not something we are going to talk about in this particular video because that is out of scope for what this course covers. But if you wanted to, there is a lot of support out there. Now if you are using WP admin, that's totally cool too, because they also have helpful articles for using Go Daddy or cloudflare or Google domains. They have all sorts of support articles on there. Because you're going to be paying for support on this website, you can always click on "Get Help" and open a brand new ticket and they will help you out very quickly. Flywheel support has always been really great to me. WordPress or WP Engine support rather has been really great to me as well. I think you're going to be in good hands with either service. So that's all there really is to launching a website on Flywheel. The process is almost identical on wpengine.com. Then for your exercise, what I would like you to do is once you have launched your website, share your link down below, share it with the community. I want to see it. If you want feedback, you can ask for feedback. I will happily give you any sort of feedback, ideas for improvement, whether it's design or copyrighting or products or pricing, anything like that, I can help you out there. You just have to share it in the section down below. So once you've launched your website and you have shared your link down below, I will meet you in the next video where we talk about all the different things we have learned in this course.
16. Course summary: Hello. Welcome to the summary video. If you are here, it means you have probably launched a website, so I want to say a huge congratulations to launching your website. Don't forget to share your link down below with the rest of the community so that we can help you, give you feedback, give you ideas, inspire you. You can also check out other people's websites for inspiration as well. But in this video, I just quickly wanted to go over some of the things that we have already learned. The first thing we did was we created a WordPress website and then we immediately enabled SSL and we forced SSL. That means we have HTTPS on our website and that little green lock that shows up in your URL bar. So it's like https:// your website.com. We forced that so that's our e-commerce site is always nice and secure. We then installed a custom theme called hestia, which you can download from the project files at any given time. We worked with WooCommerce and we got WooCommerce setup and all the different settings that it comes with. We've created a physical and a digital product. We enabled PayPal and we enabled Stripe and we looked at their settings. We customized our website by giving it a custom logo and maybe changing some of the colors and what not. You'll see my final product actually down below, so I'll get that started, you can actually see my web site that I made. We launched our website and now we're at the last phase, we are ready to sell. The first thing you need to do is start building up some audience. You need to share your link with people on the internet, and the best place to do that to start is down below, you can share your link with our community right now. If you feel a little bit nervous, that's actually a okay, I was super nervous the first time I had launch on my first website out of my first 500 websites probably, I was super nervous. But it's okay to feel nervous, that means you're doing something that's out of your comfort zone and you're going to achieve something big. Now there are a lot of little details that I didn't go over in the summary that are between the courses, a lot of things you probably learned on your own. If you learned anything great on your own, again, share that down below with everyone else. Now I have two things I want to mention, first of all, I'm Kalob Taulien, I'm your instructor for this course, and I really appreciate you taking the time to watch through this course. Again, if you have any questions, you need any support, leave a question down below on any of the relevant videos where you need any help, and I will be there for you. The second thing is, I have a Facebook group called Learning to Code. It's actually grown way beyond coding, it's just the brand name of it now. There is about 20,000 people in there, a lot of them have very similar experience to this already. You can go to facebook.com and just search for, learning to code, and apply to join that group, it's an absolutely free group. I actually answer questions in there a lot faster than I do on any platform just because I always have it on me, with my phone always being on me all the time I get push notifications every time someone asks a question in that group. I can get to those questions a lot faster if you want to join learning to code on Facebook. If you don't want to, that's totally cool and you can stick with just leaving questions down below, I have no problems with either way, I just wanted to let you know that there is a secondary support line that goes through Facebook. Thank you so much for taking this course and going on this journey with me, I really appreciate you taking the time. I hope you learned something really fantastic, something really great that you can take away that improves your life. I work really hard to make meaningful content for people. If you like this course, I would really appreciate if you could just give it a quick review. Just give it a little thumbs up there, tell people what you liked about this course, and why other people should maybe take this course. Thank you so much. Congratulations on launching a website. I guess I'll see you hopefully in another course down the road. Good luck.
Kalob Taulien, Web Development Teacher
