When an opportunity to help an artisan jewelry maker set up a new website came to me, I jumped at it. First of all, how fun to work with some beautiful images of amazing one-of-a-kind jewelry? Second, to delve into Shopify and learn how it works. I was familiar with Shopify but had never spent any time working in it specifically.
Cherie, of Unique Cherie artisan jewelry, was looking to move her current Etsy shop to Shopify so that she had more control over the site and sales of her products. She wanted help doing the initial setup, and then to be able to maintain the site on her own. I LOVE to help business owners be able to control their own website! For some business owners, being able to update their site and add products on their own is best. But a little help getting started is necessary, and of course, I am always ready to lend a hand in the future.
Cherie and I are in opposite ends of the US – she is in Florida, I am in Wisconsin, but working together went smoothly. We communicated mostly through Facebook Messenger in this instance. She sent me a document outlining all her goals, I asked a few questions, and we settled on a plan.
Setting up the Shopify site was such an easy process! Shopify has an amazing library of how-tos which I found incredible and better than other sites like Wix or WordPress. Setup went quickly and then I started to dig around to learn how it worked.
Picking out the right theme was interesting for me. Shopify has themes (themes are built out “designs” which you can customize as you want) much like WordPress, but they seem to be more extensive (and expensive). Cherie and I worked together to identify what she needed for her theme. Due to the expense of the premium themes on Shopify, we wanted to be very thorough in our research to ensure all needs were met. Cherie picked out a great theme which wound up being so perfect for her custom jewelry!
Theme setup is really the most complex part of the project and takes quite a bit of research to sort out how to get everything in place the way we wanted it. Especially because I had never used it before. Once I got it nailed down, I then worked with Cherie to improve the design and get it just like she wanted.
Along with the theme setup came setting up the product categories she needed, laying out her homepage, setting up a couple starter product pages for her, pointing her URL to Shopify, and then last, putting together a PDF with information on how to use Shopify for future use.
It is so satisfying to see how Cherie has since been able to use Shopify successfully on her own – adding products, pages, copy, images and everything.
Working with Cherie was lots of fun and I enjoyed the highly collaborative process. She was very clear on what she wanted and the look & feel of her site, which made things easy. Plus, I enjoyed getting an up close view of the jewelry which is AMAZING. I advise checking out her site for the shopping alone! There are some great gift ideas, and Christmas is never too far away. Check out UniqueCherie and see how well she built out her site.