Grizzly Ridge Outdoor Gear
Course Resources
Hey! You’re right on time. Welcome to my class, have a seat in an empty chair. I’m glad you’re here to follow my lead while we create your new website.
This page is going to provide resources you can use to put together your site while you follow along with me.
With that being said, refer back to this when I instruct you to in the course.
Getting Started
Let’s kick off this course by signing up at JackRabbit.host – you’re going to be signing up and building a website at the same time. Pretty simple.
(Click Here to go to JackRabbit.host)
1. Download The Theme
One of the best reasons to use wordpress is because you have a gazillion themes and website templates to choose from. Don’t believe me? Go to Google Images and type “free wordpress theme” and count the results.
Ok, come back, come back. We don’t have time to lollygag. Let’s stay focused. The free themes are cool, but the paid themes are much better quality and have more functions.
Themeforest is a website that sells thousands of themes. If you’d like to put together your own website later on your own, you can find any kind of theme there that will fit the type of site you’re putting together.
I’m going to show you how to set up themes on your own so you know how to do it. But again, don’t get too distracted… for now, focus on the course.
“Do I need to use the theme you use in the course?” Yes. Unless you’re experienced with wordpress, use the theme I use so you can follow along.
(Click here to download the theme)
2. Download the Course Materials
I’ve got a small bag of goodies for you, including fonts, image templates and a demo that we’ll be uploading to our site.
(Download the course materials)
3. Upgrading the Theme
We didn’t get our theme from the WordPress theme repository, so updating our theme requires an extra step. We need to download and install the Envato Market plugin so we can connect our site to Themeforest for one click updating.
(Download the Envato Market Plugin)
4. Search & Replace
I’m attempting to keep this course as simple and quick as possible. So because of that, I’ve already created pages for you that are pretty much universal across ecommerce websites. The two things you need to do is to first, Search and replace the variables I’ve created (below), and later in the course, we’re going to go over these pages to customize them further to fit your specific store.
Here are the variables you’ll need to replace with your store’s information:
Store owner’s first name: {first}
Store owner’s last name: {last}
Company name: {company}
Web address (without https://www.): {url}
Street Address: {street}
City: {city}
State: {state}
Country: {country}
Zip code: {zip}
Company email: {email}
Company Phone: {phone}
Current year: {year}
5. Custom CSS
Open up your text editor. You’re going to need to create your own CSS code. You’ll need to create a class inside a div that is relative to the parent element in order to continue.
I’m just kidding…. put your text editor away.
I promised you would be creating a website without coding, so all you need to do is copy and paste the code here and put it in your website. I’m using custom code here because I wanted to change around a few elements so they fit our store better.
(Click here to go to the CSS)
6. Free & Paid Graphics
Like I said, our budget for the course would be around $60 to $70. Since we’re working on a budget, I’d like to show you some cool resources that you can use in order to get free images, graphics and graphics for your websites… and some paid resources too.
If you’re picky and on a tight budget, go for the free trials.
(Find images, graphics and Fonts)
Do you need a new icon for the social links or any other?
The theme we’re using uses the Font Awesome library. You can browse icon library here:
(Browse the Font Awesome Library)
7. Creating Your Logo
Creating logos is a lot easier than you might think. Just look at some of the logos you see every day. Think about the iconic Nike swoosh. How long do you think it took to design the swoosh? My guess is 5 minutes.
If you’re not an artist, or don’t want to do your own logo for any other reason, you can always go to Fiverr to have someone do a logo for you. It’s cheap, you can get a good logo for $10-$20. But I suggest you give yourself a chance and try to do one yourself. You’ll be surprised and proud of yourself.
To design our logo, first, you’re not going to design a logo from scratch, you’re going to need to choose a vector image. You’re also going to need to choose a font. If you haven’t already chosen a font, it’s ok, you can play with several fonts in the editor we’ll be using.
If you have a vector you’d like to use, you’ll need to convert it to and SVG format. So unzip the vector package you downloaded, find the .eps or .ai vector inside the package, then upload and convert it with cloudconvert.
(Click here to go to CloudConvert)
To create our logo, we’re going to be using a free tool called Gravit. Welcome to 3rd period Art Class. Next period, Lunch.
(Go to Gravit)
8. Editing Your Images
Forget about Microsoft Paint. I’m sure you make a great smiley face in paint, but half ass smiley faces aren’t going to cut it if you want to pass my class. I’m going to show you a cool free image editor similar to Photoshop that you can use online.
Again, no need to install anything. If you already have Photoshop, that would be my first choice, so have at it. For the rest of you, click on the link below.
(Click here to go to the Pixlr Editor)
Homepage Slider
The big beautiful slider at the top of your site is a plugin called Revolution Slider 6 – I’ll briefly show you how to edit the images and text in this slider. If you’d like to learn more about how the plugin works, I suggest you watch the plugin author’s tutorials on their youtube channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ThemePunch/videos
9. Subscription Form Setup
Collecting emails from people when they are interested in an offer on your website is a great way to advertise for free. Usually when you advertise to people through other advertising methods like Facebook ads, you’re sending an ad to people hoping they’re interested in the things you offer.
With email marketing, you know the people on your list are interested and because of that, your sales conversion rates are much higher when sending offers through email… and again, it’s free!
In order to collect subscribers, you’ll need to set up your mailing list through mailchimp. Why mailchimp?… it’s free for the first 2,000 subscribers.
(Go to mailchimp)
Mailchimp Form Code
I’ve modified the form so it will look nice in our theme, both in the footer and in the popup form. All you need to do is paste this code in the mailchimp form code field:
<input class="frm-email" type="email" name="EMAIL" placeholder="Enter your email..." required />
<button class="frm-submit" type="submit" value="sign up">sign up</button>
10. Accepting Credit Cards
You’re going to need to accept payments on your website and although it sounds like you might need to go through a long process to do this, it’s actually easier than you might think.
It’s a good idea to do some research first before continuing. For example, I’m going to recommend using Stripe to accept payments, but in your particular case, maybe Stripe isn’t a good solution because maybe you’re in a country that doesn’t work with Stripe.
I’m going to show you how to set up Stripe, and Paypal. So Choose one first, then proceed with the setup of the processor of your choice.
If you can’t use either of these processors, there are lots of processors, you’re bound to find something that works. do a Google search for a processor that works in your country. search for something like:
best woocommerce payment processor for Nigeria
When Google shows you which payment processors work in your country, try them out. I’m sure you’ll find some good Youtube videos that will show you how to set up that processor.
11. Stripe
Stripe has been good to me, I use it for all of my businesses and I’ve never once had a problem. Five stars from me.
First, you’ll need to set up an account.
(Set up a stripe account)
Stripe has a youtube channel with one good video about how to use your Stripe Dashboard. I’m not going to go into the details, but if you’d like details and a stripe dashboard walkthrough, check out their video.
(Learn about the Stripe Dashboard)
Woocommerce made a great video that goes into the details about your stripe settings inside woocommerce. I will briefly touch on these settings while setting up Stripe on the demo website. For more details, check out this video.
12. Paypal
Paypal is usually a great choice if stripe doesn’t work. Maybe your clients will request you use paypal, even when you have stripe. It’s ok to use 2 or more processors, customers love options.
If you already have a personal paypal account, keep it personal. Set up a new paypal business account using your business email.
(Choose your country from paypal’s list)
Would you like to learn how to use the paypal dashboard? Paypal has a youtube channel with a playlist called “how to use paypal”.
Paypal Developer Dashboard Link (For testing your paypal payment method)
https://developer.paypal.com/developer/accounts/
13. Collecting Sales Tax
This is supposed to be a fun course and here we are talking about taxes… bummer.
If you’d like to make calculating taxes easier, use the automatic tax calculations settings in woocommerce. This requires Jetpack – which is useful for several things. But don’t pay for the premium version of jetpack because I’m going to show you how to backup your site automatically and how to scan your site for malware automatically for free. So stay tuned for that.
Back to taxes. Here, Woocommerce already created a nice page explaining how to set up automatic taxes, so I’m just going to touch on this subject, then move on. If you’re living in a country that isn’t supported by automatic taxes, you may need to research a different plugin or do them manually.
Click here to learn about Woocommerce Automated Taxes
This plugin only automatically calculates tax for certain countries. First, determine if you’re going to be selling to the country where your business is located, then to make sure that country is included in automated taxes and is on the list, click here.
As your business grows, If you have more than one nexus (employees in multiple tax jurisdictions, or multiple places of business, or a digital nexus in another tax jurisdiction), then you’ll need to use the wordpress plugin called “TaxJar” which is a paid service. Install it, download it, find some youtube videos that show you how to use it.
14. Dropshipping
Dropshipping… what a fun way to do business online.
It’s a pretty straight forward process; find an item you’d like to sell from any store online (that provides gift receipts), copy the image and description, create a new product on your site and paste the information. Choose a price. When you sell the product, simply go to the store you’re using to dropship from and send it to your customer.
There are some things you want to think about when dropshipping so that you don’t run into trouble and there are tools that are going to make the process a lot quicker and easier. So let’s go over these things.
I’ve dedicated a whole page to dropshipping, you can find that page by clicking here.
15. Affiliate Marketing
If you want to create a passive income, affiliate marketing is a great way to go. Here are some quick resources to get you started.
In the course, we’ll go over how to find individual Advertisers with affiliate programs using Google. You can also find and sort affiliate programs and products using affiliate networks.
Here are some popular affiliate program networks that you can use to find Advertisers:
Flex Offers
ShareASale
Commission Junction (Sign in to see Advertisers)
ClickBank
Ebay Partner Network
Amazon Affiliates
You’re going to need to do some product research, you’ll need to spend time listing products, making sure the products you’ve listed don’t go out of stock and marketing those products.
If you’re using Amazon’s affiliate program, here’s an awesome tool that will help you import and sync product prices and stock. Click here to check it out.
Pretty Links
If you’re using multiple affiliate programs, I suggest running your affiliate url’s through a wordpress plugin called Pretty Links, then using the pretty links as your product affiliate url’s.
This plugin will turn your long ugly links into shortened, prettier links. It will help you track clicks and it will also make updating Affiliate links easier in case you need to change an affiliate link later.
To install this one, just go to your wordpress dashboard, click on plugins>add new and search for Pretty Links. There’s a free version and a paid version. I suggest using the free version because it’s got the essential features you’ll need to stay organized as an affiliate marketer.
16. Running into Problems
You’re going to run into problems. That’s the nature of this game, there are too many little details that I can’t go over and provide solutions to. On top of that, all these pieces of the puzzle, WordPress, Woocommerce, Themes etc. are constantly being updated and it’s hard to keep up as an instructor.
It’s ok if you get stuck sometimes, but please keep something in mind… If you send me a message with a problem that you could have easily solved yourself with a quick Google search, then I may not be so happy. Chances are that I’m going to google it for you and send you the answer. If you went to Google first, before messaging me and tried to find the answer, you’re saving yourself time, you’re saving me time and you’re learning more.
So please! If you run into trouble, Google and Youtube are your friends. If you can’t find an answer, yes, of course you can come to me. I don’t want you to feel like I’m not approachable, I’m always going to be here for you to help. But this is not my full time job, so I’ll try to answer you when I can.
Paste this code in your theme settings
.client-logo img{
padding:10px;
}
#red-footer .wpb_single_image img {
max-width: 182px;
}
.red-footer {
margin-top: 0px;
}
.red-footer p {
line-height:22px !important;
}
/* --
to center the footer social icons below the logo edit the css directly below this comment. Change the second number after margin:
-- */
.red-footer.layout-3 .red-social {
margin: 0 -10px;
}
.red-social a {
font-size:16px;
}
.home-section .red-newsletter.minimal-with-title .title, .home-section .red-newsletter.minimal-with-title .desc {
color:#ffffff;
}
.single-product .red-page-title-text {
display:none;
}
.red-cpt-popup .frm-submit {
margin-top:10px;
width:100%;
}
.red-footer span.fa {
line-height: 22px;
font-size: 19px;
margin-right: 7px;
}
.red-footer span.style1 {
font-size:40px;
color:#ffffff;
}
.red-cpt-popup form input[type="email"] {
border: 2px solid #313131;
}
.red-banner.style-7 .title1 {
font-size: 30px;
font-weight: 700;
text-transform: uppercase;
}
.main-contact-info {
margin: 18px 0 18px 0 !important;
font-size:16px;
}
.red-footer .mc4wp-alert p {
color:#ffffff;
}
@media (min-width: 768px){
.footer-subscribe button {
overflow: visible;
width: 20%;
line-height: 28px;
margin-top:0px;
}
.footer-subscribe form input[type="email"] {
width:78%;
margin-right: 6px;
}
}
