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Online Store Course Introduction
This is the beginning of a 7 lesson course on how to build an online store using WordPress, Thesis and Shopp where the focus is particularly on the Shopp plugin.
The inspiration for this course came from another series that we did in October. In October, we had some live website makeover sessions where we invited our members to submit their sites for makeovers. And then our resident artist and I put our heads together on their sites and we worked on some designs for them.
Lanny Bassham’s Online Store
One of the sites that we worked on in this series was one of Lanny Bassham’s many sites. And the site we chose to work on was his online store which is relatively slow and performs fairly poorly. It’s in Drupal which is a system that’s difficult for him to maintain. Lanny joins us each of these sessions, both to ask questions and make comments as we go along because this store is actually his real live store.
Where to Find Course Materials and Sign Up Links On My Site
There is a course syllabus and you can download tonight’s lecture notes. If you come to this page here, this is the course page. If you are logged in, all you have to do is go to Video Lessons, down to Building an eCommerce Website and then to Build an Online Shop. If you’re not logged in then you come from Start Learning Here and the very first menu item on there is this new free class, Build an Online Store Using Shopp.
And this is where you’ll sign up for the live sessions. Most of you probably have already signed up this way but, in any case, the sign up links will be here. And there will also be links to the resources for this week’s lesson. In particular, we have this week’s lecture notes and this week’s slides. So feel free to download these lecture notes now if you want to read as we go along.
When the videos are posted, there will be a written outline of the entire session that will go along with that and that will be on a page that can be accessed from here. Each lesson will have a link there off to the lesson page where both the videos and the outline will be available.
All these videos will be available for everyone to watch for free up until February 1st which is a couple of weeks after our session is completed. After that the videos will be moved into the Premium section of the site.
Also, I will be taking questions, not only questions in the context of the webinar but questions throughout the week in between webinars. And my preferred method of taking these questions is actually going to be on our Facebook page. If you go over to facebook.com/byobwebsite and post questions on our Wall, I’ll answer them there. That’s my preferred method of answering questions here for the next 6 weeks. It’s an experiment to see how well the Wall can be used as an interactive medium for instruction like this.
In addition to writing questions out, I also have a new feature on my Facebook page that allows you to record a screencast. If you want to try this, select our Fan Central tab. There I have this section called Ask Me a Question. And under Ask Me a Question, there is this button, Record a Screencast. This will allow you to record a question and you can show your site and record your voice and everything else.
I have a short video for you to watch that will show you how to use this tool. So, if typing out your question doesn’t seem like the right way to go or you have a hard time explaining what it is you’re concerned about, by all means, use this.
Online Store Site Information
The store that we’re building is located at www.mentalmanagementstore.com and the site is currently set up with WordPress 3.3 Beta free and Thesis 1.8.2. By the time we’re done tonight, we’ll also have Shopp 1.9 installed.
And right now I would like to introduce Lanny. Good evening, Lanny. How are you doing?
Lanny: I’m doing great. How are you, Rick?
Rick: I’m doing really well. Can you turn your microphone up?
Lanny: I sure can. Is that any better?
Rick: Yeah, that’s better.
Rick: Okay, perfect. So Lanny, I haven’t said anything about you. Why don’t you tell everybody a little bit about you and what you do for a living and what your business looks like and then what you’re hoping we can accomplish?
Lanny: Well, I won a silver medal in the Olympics in 1972 in rifle shooting. I should have won the gold medal, I choked. And I wanted to take a course on how to manage my mind under pressure so when I went back next time, I wouldn’t have the same result. So I did a lot of research on what Olympic athletes and especially gold medalists were doing about the mental game and got some good information.
I created a system, used it, and won the gold medal in the Olympics and World Championships for several years. And then later after that, realized that maybe other people would be interested in what I found out. So I stared Mental Management Systems in 1977, primarily to help Olympic athletes initially and then it broadened out to a lot of other areas. Today about 50% of our business is pro golf or the golf industry. But we have a lot of other clients too. And so in our company, we, not only provide seminar support but we also have books and CDs and DVDs and downloads and ebooks online are some of the products we offer.
And what we really need is a store that can deliver all that in a way that we can manage it ourselves and make it very efficient and good for us. Okay. And so, I hope that’s what we’ll accomplish in the next 6 weeks.
Rick: I think that’s going to be plenty of time for us to get all that done. But if you have questions while I’m chatting away here, just feel free to chime in and ask them, okay?
Lanny: Okay.
What the Online Store Will Sell
So what we’re building here is an online store that sells books, CDs, DVDs, audio downloads and ebooks. And this store has some special requirements. One of them is that we need to be able to do international shipping. We need to be able to automatically calculate shipping cost before the sale is processed. We need to be able to bundle together physical and electronic products in a single purchase, even in a single product. We need to be able to automatically calculate sales tax for Texas residents while not having to calculate that for or collect it for other folks.
The reason I refer to these as special requirements is because these are things that many of the eCommerce solutions for WordPress out there have a difficult time addressing. And so it’s one of the reasons why we ended up selecting Shopp.
Online Store Tools
And so the tools we’re going to be using for this are WordPress, Thesis and Shopp plugin. As you know, the majority of my site is about the Thesis theme and how to use the Thesis theme. So we will be talking about Thesis although much about what we’re going to do can be done in other WordPress themes as well.
We’ll be using authorize.net as our payment provider although I will also show you how to set up a standard PayPal version as well. Again, most of the tutorials out there have demonstrated how to set up PayPal. This time, we’re going to be setting up authorize.net and it will include the SSL certificate and that sort of thing. And we’ll also be setting up Amazon S3 as the secure storage for the downloadable content. So there’s a number of interesting elements to this.
And the reason we are using Shopp is that it meets all of our business requirements. Unlike other plugins that are available it does allow us to do all the things in this business that we need to do. We’re also using Shopp because Shopp and Thesis have been tested together and they work well without problems so we don’t have to monkey around with Shopp code or Thesis code in order to make it work.
Shopp and Thesis work together just fine right out of the box. Also, Shopp and Thesis are both very highly customizable and they have similar types of customization. So if you’re familiar with customizing Thesis, you’ll be familiar with using hooks and filters for customizing. As it turns out, Shopp does exactly the same thing. Shopp has hooks and filters that allow you to customize virtually any part of the process. And so, there are very common concepts in customizing them.
And then finally, Shopp has a business model that’s likely to survive the long haul, at least in my estimation. The problem with relying heavily on plugins that are free is that it’s not a model for long term business success. Most of the free plugins are essentially are labors of love by people who aren’t being paid in order to do it. The business is too important for us to rely on those free plugins to always work, not knowing how well they’ll survive in the future. Shopp has a model where it sells its software and or licenses its software. And that is likely to produce necessary revenue for it to stay in business.
Who Should Take This Online Store Class
This class is for anybody who wants to learn the nuts and bolts of setting up an online store using WordPress because that’s what we’re going to be addressing – the nuts and bolts of setting it up. It’s a suitable class for both beginning to advanced students. I know we have some advanced people in the audience here. However, advanced students are going to have to suffer through some basic explanations of things that they already understand and they’ll be doing that tonight.
And if you’re a beginner, you may need to hang in there a little bit and sort of power through some things because we may be talking about concepts that you’re not familiar with. I want to make sure that the question and answer period that we have afterwards gets used for these questions as well as all of the communication methods that are available such as posting on our facebook wall. I want you to learn the material that we’re trying to cover here.
But really, if you’re a beginner and you’re having a hard time understanding what we’re talking about and this is something that’s important to you, then use any tool at your disposal to contact me. You can email me or call me on the phone. You can Skype me and you can text me. You can do any of those things. And all my contact information is on the site so I’m easily accessible and available.
Why I’m Teaching This Online Store Class
So why am I teaching this? Well, I’m teaching this because I really enjoy teaching how to use WordPress. I enjoy teaching small business owners how to build their own websites, how to leverage the software that’s available to them inexpensively or free, how to use their time and their skills to bring their products to the internet.
I was a small business owner, an architect, back in the late 2000s when the floor dropped out of the market and if it hadn’t been for WordPress we would have gone under. And I learned a lot about what it takes for a small business owner to run a website online and I want to share that with other small business owners.
Also, I’m totally fascinated by this new movement of democratization of instruction. We’re really at the beginning of the existence of inexpensive, high-speed broadband, the existence of inexpensive video creation tools. And WordPress has made it possible for the education paradigm that we are familiar with to be changed.
The current education paradigm is centered on institutions and those institutions limit access for participants. Not anybody can learn with them and they also limit access to teachers so not just anybody can teach. Well, the new paradigm allows for the development of knowledge communities where anybody with the knowledge can teach and anybody with the desire and the aptitude can learn. And that’s what this process is an experiment in. It’s an experiment in adult education in the new education paradigm and I happen to just have a lot of fun doing that.
What You As Students Of This Online Store Class Can Do For Me
So what can you do for me? Well, the first thing that you can do for me is help this be interactive. This is going to be way more interesting for everybody if this is interactive which means that you ask questions during the question and answer session.
Now that I’ve been doing this for a couple of years, I know that people are apprehensive to ask questions. They don’t want to ask something because they don’t want to sound dumb or they don’t want to ask something because somebody else out there is going to have a better question. The problem with that is it stops lots of really good questions from being asked. So the chances are, if you have a question then other people in this seminar also have that question and other people watching this seminar later are going to have that question. So it makes the whole process much better if people how are participating ask questions.
And also, not just asking questions but asking questions about your specific situation. Really, one of the fun things about this class is that we’re actually building a real store, a real store that is going to actually sell the products when we’re finished with it. We’re not building a sample store with sample products where the outcome doesn’t really matter. And you sharing your experiences and your questions from your experiences will go a long way to making this interesting.
And so that’s what you can do for me. You can make this more interesting by making it more interactive, by asking questions either in the Q&A or in Facebook in between sessions so that other people have a chance to learn from them. And then finally, if you found this seminar to be valuable then if you wouldn’t mind posting a link to the page on Facebook or tweeting about it would be great.
Just a final reminder that if you don’t make each webinar, you can easily catch up because the videos will be available on my site before the next week’s class.
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