In this lesson, you're going to build a homepage for your online store. Don't be intimidated. Homepages are not that big a deal, because like I said, in the previous lesson, we're not going to direct customers directly to your homepage instead, you'll send them to the product page first. So the purpose of your homepage is just to make sure that your store looks professional and presentable, and you want to be able to lead customers from the homepage to your product pages as efficiently as possible. Just to note, it's probably easier for you to watch this lesson all the way through and then go back and apply what you learned to your own store than to try to follow me step by step.
That's just because there's a lot of really small steps that go into making your homepage look great. Let's hop into Shopify and I'll use black bear bike shop as the example, when we talk about how to make your homepage look excellent. From the Shopify admin first go to settings and then general and replace your admin name with your brand new business name. Everything else can stay as it is after you've saved that go back to online store. And then from there, you'll be taken to the themes section within the theme section, click customize in the right hand section of the website, you can see a preview of what your store looks like right now.
And if you click the icon at the top, you can also see a preview of what your store looks like in mobile, which is really handy on the left hand side of this window are the settings that you'll play with to make adjustments to your homepage. Each of these sections that are listed on the left corresponds with a section that you see in the preview on the right as a first step, add an announcement bar to do that, click header, and then scroll all the way down until you see the announcement bar section check, show announcement, and uncheck homepage only for texts, write free shipping on all orders, emoji optional.
The reason you want to say this is it's a great incentive to get customers to buy. And remember back when we were pricing our products, we included the cost of shipping in that final price that customers are seeing. So the customer thinks they're getting shipping for free, but actually you've baked shipping costs into your retail cost. So you're not losing anything by offering free shipping and you may be gaining some customers instead.
Now you'll notice you have these big opportunities for images on your homepage, but what images should you put there? I recommend you use stock photos. Stock photos are photos that aren't necessarily images of your specific products. Instead they're images that are related to your products category, or maybe to your customer's lifestyle. One great place to look for stock photos is burst, and I'll leave a link to burst below this lesson.
When you go to burst, go to the search bar and type anything related to your brand or your niche. For example, I typed bicycle and I saw these images, which I loved. You can download as many of these images as you want for free, no strings attached. Another great site for stock photos is Unsplash. I went over to Unsplash because I wanted to see if there were any good, like black bear photos. And surprisingly, there were dozens.
So I went ahead and I downloaded some of those just so that I'd have the option to play around with those images too. And just like in burst, I don't need to worry about paying or any kind of copyright images with these stock photos back in Shopify. I can add these images by clicking the back arrow and then clicking the images with text overlay section from there, I can upload my image and boom. I've got a really cool image on my homepage for the heading and the copy here, consider what you're selling and also why you're selling it.
But also don't be afraid to have a little bit of fun for my heading i'll write, no more grizzly commute, bear pun, shop cycling accessories to make your next ride more safe, comfortable, and fun. I'll make the button label shop now. And the button link will lead to products. I'm using the Debut theme and right below the hero image by default, there are a lot of other sections that are listed. Now, this is kind of just Shopify flexing because you don't need to have all of these sections when you're launching your store. In fact, I recommend that you delete some of these sections by clicking on them on the left side of the window, and then clicking remove section.
The ones that you should keep in this case are ones that help you feature your products, because remember you want to get those customers away from your homepage and into the product page. So that they'll buy one good section to add here is a featured product section. So click on add section and you'll see all the possible sections you could add here. I see featured product and it looks like it's in my store, but it's not make sure you click add to store.
You just have to remember to click add section. Then it's added to your actual store and you can adjust where it is in the list of sections on your homepage. Choose any product, you're proud to feature. Make sure your homepage also includes a newsletter section. You want to capture as many email addresses as possible. Email addresses are pure gold because when a customer leaves you their email address, they're saying I'm kind of interested in what you have to sell here.
You want to be able to reach out to customers like that again, to let them know about new products and other offers. That's free marketing. Do not give it up. Feel free to play around with the rest of these sections, stock images and creative copy until you have a layout. That looks good. And then when you're done with that, it's time to move into theme settings. This is where you're going to adjust colors and typography of your homepage. But I urge restraint here.
A lot of people want to go nuts and have a multicolored fabulous homepage. And while certainly some brands do that and it looks fantastic when you're just starting out. If you keep your color palette a little bit more restrained, chances are it's going to be easier for customers to read your copy and see your images. And that's the top priority. So for Blackberry bike shop, I'll go to theme settings and then colors. But I actually like the default colors here.
I just want to add a little bit of brand color and I'll do that by changing the button colors. I really like this dark green color. When I choose that color, I can see that the button on my header image stands out more as does the button for subscribing to the newsletter. That's great. I love it when call to action buttons stand out. For typography feel free to be creative with your header and button fonts. But again, use restraint. When you're thinking about getting wild with your body fonts, because you want customers to be able to read that stuff easily for my headers and buttons, I'll choose Neue Aachen because I need all the help with German pronunciation that I can get. I like that it looks a little bit outdoorsy.
Like it was etched into a log cabin or something. I feel like that belongs with my black bear vibe. The only other thing worth messing about with right now is the Favicon because you actually already have that. The Favicon is that little tiny image that's in the browser tab. And when you downloaded your zip file from Hatchful, it included a Favicon of your logo. Granted, this is a little hard to see, but you have it. So you might as well flaunt it. Open up your Hatchful zip file.
Find the file labeled Favicon and go ahead and upload it here. As you can see with just a few clicks and not even a lot of time, a really professional homepage starts to take shape. Your homework is to take what you've learned in this lesson, fool around with all your options and get your homepage to a place where you're really proud to show it off to others. Once you're done with that head over to the next lesson, and we'll put the finishing touches on your store before you go live.
