NEW DivineNY.com website

Welcome to the NEW DivineNY.com!

Launching a new website has been a long time goal of mine and I’m happy to say that it is now finally live!  

I used Shopify to build this site.

Shopify has a lot of tools such as Shopify Academy that help walk you through how to build your website, however, it did take me awhile (several months, in fact!).

Though it may be possible to get a Shopify site up and running in 2 weeks, there are a lot of things to consider and I recommend taking time to plan your site design on paper first.  

Start with designing the home page.  This post on Homepage Design 101 on Shopify’s blog shares helpful tips.  The first question you need to think about as you design your homepage is “what do you want visitors to do when they land on your homage”.

With that question in mind, I came up with a quick sketch of what I wanted my homepage to look like.  My objective:  When visitors come to my homepage, I want them to be creatively inspired.

Once you have a good idea of what you want your homepage to look like, then you want to start planning Collections.  A collection will group products together based on product tags that you assign to your product listings.

If you visit the DivineNY.com homepage, you’ll see that I created the following Collections:  Silk Painting Kits, Felt Craft Kits, Shop DIY Kits and Patterns and Tutorials (under DIY Kits).  

Here’s another tip: keep track of product listings and product tags in a Google sheet or Excel.  The more organized you can be about your product tags, the easier it will be for you to create automated Collections.

In terms of a step-by-step flow, this is what I recommend:

1. Sketch the homepage design on paper
2. Create product listings
3. Create Product Tags
4. Create Collections
5. Create content for other pages (About, Services, Contact Us, FAQs etc.)
6. Design the main and footer navigation

Keep in mind that steps, 2, 3 and 4 are connected to each other and you should think about it holistically and not as separate functions.

It takes time to learn about all the features Shopify offers….and I’m still learning and tweaking my site even after it has gone live.  But overall, I’m excited to have a new ecommerce website launched, a site that I can easily maintain and update on my own!

Note:  I am part of the Shopify Affiliate program.  The links found in this post are affiliate links - this means that if you click on the link and sign up for a Shopify plan, I may receive a small commission.  Please be assured that I only promote products and services that I personally use and truly believe in.