Posted by In the last tutorial we made changes to the Homepage, and edited the menu. We now need to tidy up the sidebar on the product and shopping cart pages. The content for these sidebars is created from ‘widgets‘, sections of content similar to the ‘blocks‘ that we looked at when we edited the Homepage.
To get started, let’s go to ‘Appearance > Widgets‘. You will see a screen such as the one below. In the centre of the screen are the ‘Available Widgets‘. These include menus, custom HTML options, audio and video players, images, navigation menus etc. These can all be applied to the widget areas shown to the right of the page. With Storefront you will note that there is a Sidebar area, a Below Header section, and four possible Footer Columns, for content at the base of the page.
Our Sidebar is pretty full at the moment with unnecessary content, such as Meta information and blog archives. We don’t need the search as this is also at the top of our site. I’m going to clear it all up. This is easily achieved by clicking the arrow at the top of each widget and then clicking delete from the options that are displayed. You will notice when you preview your site that you have a much cleaner full-width site. I may add some sidebar content, Google Adsense ads for example, once my store is up and running and generating traffic.
It’s prudent to test your site before it goes live to save embarrassment (and expense). To check this in the real world, I lowered the price of an item (to a penny) and then did a dummy transaction posing as a third party to check that everything works fine. I can confirm that my site worked like a dream! This is also an opportunity to show how WooCommerce treats a customer order. Once you’ve tested an order on your own site, go to WooCommerce > Orders, and you’ll see something similar to the page below. You now have all the information you need (as well as payment to despatch the order to your customer…
We now have our E-Commerce store up and running and ready to do business. We have a website running successfully, an inventory of products and the basics of our site in place. We shouldn’t just kick back and wait for the sales to come flooding in, there’s a lot more to do to promote our store, and plenty of tweaks, additions, and improvements we can make to our site. For the moment though we can congratulate ourselves on a job well well done!
In tutorials still to come, we’ll be looking at a range of other things to implement on our site. These are to include:
- GDPR Compliance – What do we need to do to be legal?
- Mailing list integration – How to integrate a mailing list such as Mail Chimp to your site to increase sales.
- Syncronising your site with Royal Mail for easy processing of orders.
- A full series of WP-Lister tutorials on how to syncronise your E-Commerce system with Ebay and Amazon for increased sales.
