How to make an E-Commerce Website using WordPress & Thesis Theme - Part 1
http://www.byobwebsite.com - How to Create an E-Commerce Website. - part 1 - This is part of the Build Your Own E-Commerce Website tutorial series. Our goal is to show you how to develop manage and maintain your own business web presence.
In this tutorial we do an overview of all of the elements of an E-Commerce Website based on WordPress, Thesis and WP eStore. http://www.byobwebsite.com/video-tuto...
Hi, and welcome to Lesson 1 of the Build Your Own E-Commerce Web Site tutorial series. My name is Rick Anderson and I'll be your instructor throughout the entire series. The goal of this tutorial series is to show you how to create a fully functional e-commerce Web site using WordPress, Thesis and WP EStore. This tutorial series assumes you have a hosting account with a domain name and WordPress installed on that domain. It also assumes that you have the Thesis theme installed and activated on that site. If this is not the case please review the material in our Start Building Your Web Site Here tutorial series first. There is a bunch of information in that series that we will not be repeating here.
In this lesson we'll explore the organization of this e-commerce Web site and look at all the building blocks we'll be using to create it. So in Part 1 of the lesson we'll take a brief tour of the demonstration Web site that I've created for this purpose. In Part 2 of this lesson we'll do an overview of the organization or of the information architecture of the new site and in Parts 3 through 6 we'll look closely at the four major components of our new site. Those components are sales, information, marketing, and user experience.
Overview of Our New E-Commerce Site
Okay let's go ahead and get started. In the first part of this lesson we're going to view our desired outcome. I want you to open your browser and go to www.thesisestore.com. This is a Web site that I've created specifically for the purpose of demonstrating how to create such a Web site and in the course of this tutorial series we will learn step-by-step how to create every single element of this Web site. On this Web site we are selling a variety of products. We are selling physical books, ebooks, software and video instruction. The physical books obviously have to be mailed and the ebooks, software and video instruction all will have immediate secure download upon purchasing the product.
Conceptually we have four big elements to our site. The first is Sales, and then Information, Marketing and the User Experience. We'll be talking about all those subjects around this e-commerce site organized into these four areas.
Sales Component
In terms of Sales we have our Home page with a call to action with a bunch of text describing why our product is great. We have a Catalog that essentially serves as a department page that shows each of the different types of products that we sell. And then we have individual product type pages. For example, this product is Books, another product might be Ebooks, and then finally we have the individual detailed views of the books where we have the full information about the product that we're selling.
Information Component
Next we have our information component and that includes our Blog page where we have informative articles that draw people to our site and our Customer Support and About pages which tell people about our policies and contact and support information.
Marketing Component
Next we have our Marketing and the marketing portion of the site is focused on email marketing so we have a variety of way of capturing an email address. We have free downloads in exchange for email addresses; we have Customer Support requests in exchange for email addresses and we collect the email address upon sales. The purpose for collecting the email addresses in all of these cases is so that we can market additional products and services to the people that come to our site.
User Experience Component
And then finally we have the User Experience component of the site. This includes things like our navigation system here and the clarity of the information that's contained on the page, the ability for our customers to interact with our Web site via product reviews and customer support requests. And finally the easy ability of our customers to make a purchase with a simple shopping cart that is clear and straight forward and with a Buy Now option that will take people directly from the page to a place where they can purchase the product.
Okay that wraps up the first part of Lesson 1 of the Build Your Own E-Commerce Web Site Tutorial Series. In the second part of this lesson we'll take a look at how the site is organized in its information architecture.