So just before we get into themes, I really hope at this stage of the course, you're beginning to
realize how genuinely passionate I am about you succeeding with this business and amongst all the great
stuff that you're learning now and everything that's coming up in the future, I want to just take a
moment to give you a quick tip about time management, because time management is so crucial to success,
and that tip is as follows.
It is much better to do 15 minutes per day rather than trying to do, let's say, three hours on a Saturday.
And the reason for that is actually twofold.
First of all, generally speaking, it's really difficult for us to make three hours available on any
day because we all have busy lives.
And secondly, and this really is the important part, if you try to do three hours of work on anything
and I'm sure you've tried this, you start off, your brain is working great to start with, but it
slowly drops off over time.
It just does.
It's natural.
Whereas if you do 15 or 30 minutes a day, not only is that time a lot easier to find, but also your
brain is really active during that entire period, meaning that you can be really, really productive.
So in order to be really efficient with your time, what I strongly suggest you do is you pick 30 minutes
every day, ideally, and during that time you work exclusively on building your new business.
And that means and this is crucial during that period, switch off all distractions.
And of course, what I'm primarily talking about is your phone.
Put it on silent, put it in another room, whatever you need to do to stop it disturbing you so that
you can really focus on what you're doing.
And then when you do that, and I promise you this will happen, you will look back even after a few
days and certainly after a few weeks, and you'll be completely amazed at the progress that you have
made.
So there we go.
A quick tip on time management that really will make an enormous difference to your business.
Now, of course, if you know that already, that's fantastic.
But I also know that many people taking this course have never built a business before.
And so quick tips such as that and many others that I'll be giving you as we go through the course,
really will help you out on your journey to success.
So let's get into this lecture because it really is a good one.
You're about to see that themes can really transform your store.
But first of all, what actually is a theme?
Well, a theme is effectively the way your store is presented.
So if you think about shops in the real world as you walk around different stores, they're all presented
in different ways.
They all have different themes, and we can control the look and feel of our store in exactly the same
way by coming down to online store, clicking on online store, and then selecting themes.
And it's here that we can choose different themes.
And then having chosen the theme that we want, we can then edit it in whatever way we like in order
to give our store the look and feel that we're looking for.
Now, I realize that that could be still a little bit confusing and perhaps quite difficult to visualize,
so let me try to bring it to life.
As you can see down here already we have the Dawn theme.
The dawn theme is our current theme.
It's the default theme that comes with Shopify and gives us the look and feel of our store, a look
and feel that you're already familiar with, with the logo and the menu laid out in the way that we've
been looking at.
But we could completely change this look and feel by simply selecting another theme.
And there are hundreds to choose from, some of them free and some of them paid.
But just to give you an idea, let's have a quick look at some of the free ones.
And to do that, all you need to do is to scroll towards the bottom here until you see this popular
free themes.
Now by default, as you now know, we have the Dawn theme installed, but there's also a theme called
spotlight.
There's another one called refresh, and then craft and then sense.
But the point here is, as I'm sure you can see immediately, each one of these themes has a completely
different look and feel.
And so, for example, if I liked the look and feel of the refresh theme, all I would need to do is
to click on the add button here.
And that would completely change the way my store looks.
So themes really are very, very powerful.
And later on in the course, I'll be giving you some more tips on how to choose the best theme for your
store.
But right now I want to focus on the Dawn theme.
Because once you know how to use the Dawn theme, you can pretty much use any theme you want.
And so to take a closer look at the Dawn theme and make any changes that we want, all you need to do
is to click on customize.
And that opens up what I'll be referring to as the theme editor.
This is where you can edit your theme.
Now, much like most editors, of course, we have a menu down the left hand side here, and we have
a right hand pane, which of course is our store.
I'm sure you recognize it.
And as we make any changes over here on the left, they're going to be immediately recognized over here
on the right.
So it really is a fantastically powerful editor.
Now, just before I show you some of the key points of the left hand menu, I want to.
Draw your attention to this part up here where you see desktop and mobile, meaning that we can immediately
see how our store is going to look on desktop.
That's what it looks like right now, but we can also see how it's going to look on mobile simply by
clicking on mobile.
And this is a really key point because Shopify is what we call a responsive system.
In other words, whatever platform somebody is using to look at your store, it could be a desktop,
laptop, tablet, mobile, you name it, your store is going to look great every time.
Okay, so let me go back to desktop so that I can start teaching you how to use this theme editor.
And to kick things off, I want to draw your attention to this part at the top here where it says Home
Page.
Now, if I open this up, it presents me with a menu with all the various components of our store.
Now, a lot of these components you don't know about yet, although we have in fact looked at pages.
But the point is that you can use the theme editor to change the look and feel of every part of your
store.
But right now, and in order to avoid getting completely overwhelmed, we're going to focus on the home
page.
And then just to avoid this lecture, getting excessively long because there's a lot that I want to
show you.
I hope you don't mind, but I'm actually going to break this into two parts.
So I'll see you in the next lecture for part two.