As a small business owner, I have quickly become a jack of all trades. I've removed wasp nests, run power tools, climbed ladders, made chalk paint, googled how to get paint out of carpet, removed said paint from carpet, and now I am in the midst of building a REAL website.
Why REAL? Well, I've had a website for nearly 3 years now but it wasn't functional. This is my second attempt at building a website via Shopify. I started this process in January of 2017. I didn't make it past the 14 day trial before the distractions of running a store 5 days a week took over. Then I planned to write this website a few more times. Each time something completely out of my control happened, preventing the down time I needed to devote to learning something new.
By fall, I decided I'd get through the holidays, continue apologizing to people about my pitiful website, and close on December 31. I'd reopen when my website was functional.
I am hopefully about halfway through this process. Today I had a breakthrough. I kept trying to accomplish things, specifically the menu. I simply didn't have enough content to do so and get a feel for how the site would look. I didn't want to link things that really didn't go somewhere for fear that I'd forget to go back and change it before the site went live. And I really wanted to see if this would work the way I envisioned before moving forward.
After receiving some guidance from a patient shopify customer support person, I had all my questions answered. She helped me in a few places where I was stuck, despite watching a few (hours) of you tube videos. I had my list of questions ready (and another list already started for the next call). She suggested the theme I picked may not be ideal for my needs. Changing a theme is a significant amount of work (or so I've heard). I needed to figure out fast if this theme would work for me or if I was destined to change it.
After hanging up the phone, I decided to make under construction pages, products, image files, and collections. With these tools that I can easily redirect, delete or use again as needed in the future, I made progress. Now I could link things. Now I have a menu structure I can work with to "see" on my screen and click around. It's easy to now understand how this is all going to come together. I just needed a few placeholder for linking. I think the theme is going to work out just perfectly. Now, off to make more collections . . .
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