Build Your Site & Shop: Beginner’s Guide to Shopify & Website Design

Learn how to build your own beautiful website without any coding knowledge! This class is great for creatives and small business owners wanting to build their own site. It also includes a bonus section on how to build a portfolio site on Adobe Portfolio, which is free/included if you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription!

A Website Class for Creatives

I usually make illustration and digital painting class, so why make a website building class? Because creatives need one, and many don’t realize that they can do it entirely themselves! I know people who spend $10K+ to hire teams to build their websites, and to be honest they look the pretty much same as the ones I build on my own. I’ve worked as a project lead at a digital design agency so I also know how to approach it from a professional perspective.

I want to share my experience in a way that is helpful and actionable to creatives and small businesses. I love building my own websites and wanted to show how others can do it too. 

What You’ll Learn

In this class I show you how to build your own beautiful website without any coding knowledge. It focuses on Shopify, which is the platform I used to build Mimochai.com.

We’ll go over how Shopify works, including:

• Platform Walkthrough
• Picking A Theme
• Planning Your Site
• Setting Up:
  • Product Pages
  • Digital Product Pages
  • Collections
  • Subpages
  • Blogs & Blog Posts
  • Navigation
  • Homepage
• Adjusting Your Theme Settings
• Comparison: Free Templates vs. Paid Templates
• Finalize Settings

I also have a shorter bonus walkthrough of Adobe Portfolio, which is what I used to make my portfolio site Mimi-Chao.com 🙂

Resources

• Font Pair (editable): fontpair.co
• Font Pairings & Color Palettes: https://www.pagecloud.com/blog/best-google-fonts-pairings
• Site Plan Template: Google Doc
• Class Sample Assets: See the attachments under the Projects & Resources tab!
• More stock photos available at burst.shopify.com

Themes Used

✨Update 2023✨ The available themes have been changed and upgraded, and actually free themes are a lot more powerful than they used to be, so I’m currently using a free theme for Mimochai.com! More info below. 

• Shopify (Free): Dawn (this is my current one! I formerly used Narrative, no longer available) 
• Shopify (Paid): Turbo by Out of the Sandbox 
• Adobe Portfolio Themes (Free): See all themes (I formerly used Lukas, which is no longer available)