This is the blog post that accompanies the following video:
Transcription:
The most important part of any website is the content. In this video, we’re going to create 4 pages that almost every e-commerce site will want to have: a home page, an FAQ page, as well as about us and contact us pages. The actual store where products are sold on our site will get created in a later video, when we go over adding plugins to our website. At this point, you should have a domain with WordPress installed and user accounts created for the people who need them. If you don’t, check out the earlier videos in our tutorial series.
To get started, log in to your website with your editor account. Let’s start by creating our homepage with a bit of basic content. Most themes will have a separate homepage template, so we won’t worry too much about this page for right now. Go to the “Pages” section of the WordPress admin, and click on the “Add New” button at the top of the page. We’ll call our page “Home” for now by clicking the title bar and typing in “Home”, but you could title this page your business’ name as well. Next, write a couple of quick sentences describing your business, and hit the “Publish” button. Congratulations, you’ve just added the first page to your site!
Next, let’s make the page that we just created the homepage for our site. To do that, go to “Settings” -> “Reading” in the WordPress admin menu. Click on the “A static page” radio button, and select “Home” from the “Front Page” dropdown menu of the pages on your site. Scroll down, and click the “Save Changes” button. Next, open up a new tab, and navigate to your website. You should now see the page you just created when you enter your site’s URL.
We’re also going to add three pages that most sites need: an about us page, which talks about the history of your business and what makes you unique, an FAQ page, so that common questions can be answered quickly for visitors, and a contact us page, so that visitors can get information on how to contact you by phone along with listing your address.
Let’s create our “About Us” page. We do it in exactly the same way as the other pages, just this time we’ll add a couple of paragraphs of content, and a bullet point list explaining our values. Things you usually want to mention in an “About Us” page include things like when you opened, what the unique history of your site is, such as how you became interested in a particular line of goods you stock or your experience working with the products in your inventory, and any specialties you might have. We’ll also add in a bullet point list, talking about our business’ values. To do that, click on the “Bulleted List” button. We’ll list our values as “Courteous” and “Knowledgeable”. Hit “Publish”, and then press the “Add New” button.
For the FAQ page, we’ll just put in our title “Frequently Asked Questions” and then add a sentence saying “FAQs coming soon” before hitting publish. We’ll be adding in FAQs using a plugin in a later video.
Finally, we’ll add a “Contact Us” page. The format of this page depends a bit on the type of e-commerce site you run. Most sites will want a contact form, so that potential customers are able to get in touch with you easily to have their questions answered. We’ll go over adding a contact form in our plugins video as well, but for now, it’s probably a good idea to add your phone number to the page. If you also have a brick-and-mortar store, you can add the address of that store to this page as well. If you want to add an embedded map showing the location of your store, we’ve linked to our video of it in the description.
That’s it for the basic content of your shop site! In the next video, we’ll choose a theme, customize it with your color scheme and pictures of your goods, and build a proper homepage for your website.
