[MUSIC PLAYING] I've been building my business on Shopify for the last seven years. I use Shopify, because it's trustworthy, reliable, and it really makes my order management easy for my business. In this lesson, I'm going to give you a quick tutorial for how to start your store, edit the look and the feel of your store on Shopify. I'm going to start a Shopify store completely from scratch right now.
And you can follow along with me to build the basics that we plan for based on photography. Shopify has a really helpful course called Get Started with Shopify, which will walk you through setting up shipping, inventory, and setting up different pages, and more. So let's start by going to Shopify.com. I'm going to start by going to Get Started. So it's going to ask you some basic questions about your address and phone number.
Go ahead and just answer each question and just proceed through. Congratulations. You've officially activated your Shopify store. My first step is going to be activating our theme we're going to use. So let's go ahead and click on Online store here on the left. And then you can see the active theme is debuted. There's lots of different themes to choose from.
But I'm going to choose one of the free themes here. So I'm going to go explore free themes. You see there's a bunch. We built this shot list based on Brooklyn. So I'm going to go ahead and just load up Brooklyn. You can see there's a couple different styles. I'm going to choose Classic to start. So now that Brooklyn has loaded into our system, it's not quite active yet. So I'm going to go ahead and go to Actions. And I'm going to go ahead and Publish it.
This is going to make this theme live. You can actually edit it and make changes in its unactive state before you're ready to make it go live. So you can play around with some different themes if you'd like. Let's go ahead and start by going to Customize. So now that Brooklyn is loaded, let's go ahead and take a look at what we got here.
We have the header, which is this top area up here where it says Product Photography Course, Home, and Catalog. And then right below that is Slideshow. Slideshow is actually this first banner image here. And you can tell it's blank right now. So let's go ahead and load some images into it. We talked about in our shot list how we're going to use a stock image. So I'm going to go to this first slider.
I'm going to click on it. And I'm going to Select Image. Now here I can upload an image. But we're going to actually upload free images. Now I think since we're talking about having a Shopify apparel website, I'm going to go and search for a man with sunglasses. And you see there's just a bunch to choose from.
I'm actually going to choose this one. But you can see that there's just so many to choose from. And these are all free. So I'm going to go ahead and select it. You could tell it kind of gives you a little preview here on the right. Good. And if I wanted to add more slides, I could go ahead and do that. So you can see right now it's a blank slide. And we're just going to follow the same thing until we have the type of design that we really like.
So the next thing that we're going to do is edit the image alt text to help us with SEO. So in order to do that, we will go Edit. And you can see that image alt text becomes available. And it prompts you to say Write a brief description of this image. So we need to think about what are keywords are going to be. So we're going to say Shopify sunglasses. So if somebody searches Shopify sunglasses on the website, this image will show up.
And maybe we'll get a click to our website. So now you know how to start your store and choose your theme. In the Resources section, you can see the step-by-step guide to learn how to edit your website's navigation and create pages like About Us and Contact Us. In the next lesson, you'll learn how to create an effective product page with the photographs you took in this course.
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