Manage Store. University

Transcription

1 Manage Store University

2 LESSON [#] In this lesson, you will learn how to: [Bullet point 1] [Bullet point 2] [Bullet point 3] Transcript Creating content for your site is a great compliment to your products. Web Content includes all the great stuff like contact forms, informational pages, and your blog. These items let customers get closer to your brand, reach out for help, but most importantly this original content helps people find you, by boosting your SEO strength. To get started building content, travel over to the Content link in your menu. And then click on Web Pages. The first item I d like to build is a Contact page. This can be one of the most highly viewed pages in your store, especially if you have a brick and mortar. Customers always want to know locations, store hours or ask you questions about your products. You can enter all those things in your Contact page. Click the Create a Web Page button. The first option is to decide what type of page this will be. Pick the last item that reads Allow people to send questions/comments via a contact form. This automatically inserts a form onto this webpage on your site that allows your customers to send you a message. This will be delivered as an to the address of your choosing. First, I ll name my page. Names like Contact

3 or Contact Us are pretty standard and most customers already understand what these pages will possess. These are pretty standard titles, but it s totally up to you. Just be sure to name this something that makes sense to your users. As you move away from the Page Name field you ll see the Page URL automatically populate. This is ideal, and unless you re certain you want a different URL for this page, it s best to leave this as is. Then you have the Content section. This is where you can add in all that other Contact info about your store. If you have a physical brick and mortar address it s a great idea to enter that here. What are the hours of operation? You might also list a public address and phone number that you provide to the public. You ll also want to think about writing a short message to your customers about how excited you are to receive their questions, comments and feedback. This is the data that can really help you improve your shop and your offerings. If you want to add a little flair to your contact page you can actually embed a google map into your website. Just go to google maps and type in your store s address. Drop down the menu and select embed. Once you get the embed iframe code you can enter it into the HTML section of your WYSIWYG content field. Remember, you don t have to do this on your Contact page, you can create a Directions page, or a Location page, or whatever you think works best for your store. Each type of content page has a WYSIWYG editor with an HTML button. I ll scroll down to my contact information. Here is where we can decide what address we wish to receive customer questions and feedback. Below, you may decide what fields you want to offer to your customer. To keep it easy Bigcommerce selects 2 fields for you by default: address and Question/

4 comment. It s proven that the more fields you offer customers to submit, the less likely they will be to submit questions or feedback. We want to promote feedback, so I ll leave this as is. with just the address and Question field to be filled out by my customers. Easy-Breezy. However, some businesses will need to collect phone numbers or Order numbers based on their business needs, so we ve given you the option. If you have special needs you can always install a custom form into any content page, by utilizing the HTML field within the WYSIWYG editor, or you can always create a custom template layout file if you re experienced with HTML and CSS. Below we ll see Navigation menu options. It s a good idea to include this in your navigation menu. Every theme is different as to where they display the content menu. It could be on the top of your Bigcommerce store, some themes show it in a left navigation pane, or it will be down in the footer of your site. Selecting a parent a page, will make this page you re creating a child or subpage of that parent page. For many themes this will hide it from the home page navigation, so depending on the organization of your site, you ll want to decide what pages need to be upfront and visible, and which can be sub pages of other, more important content pages. Content like Contact deserves to be a top level page so I ll leave this on No Parent Page. Below, within Advanced Options, you ll see those ever-so-important SEO fields: Page Title and Meta Description. As always, you should definitely fill these fields out on every page, blog post or product. You can enter up to 70 characters in the Title field and up to 150 characters in the Description field. Search keywords will help customers find this page in your store s search. This doesn t have anything to do with the search engines, but is helpful nonetheless. Put a few keywords in here such as Contact us, Location, Phone Number, Hours...whatever you want this page

5 to result for. Below is the template layout file, which allows you to customize the layout of this page, but you ll need HTML/CSS experience for this. Check out our Knowledge Base for more information regarding Template files. Lastly you can set this as your homepage, but be aware then you won t have products on your homepage, or you can restrict this page to your customers who have created accounts and are logged in to your store. Depending on the content of a particular page, this could be a useful feature to help entice users to create accounts and login. Sort order can help order all of your pages just the way you like them. Or if you Save and Exit, you can always drag and drop the order of your pages. Whatever page is 1st here will show first in your navigation menu. Now let s create a Content page. I ll click Create a Web Page again. This time I can just leave it on Content, since I will not have a submission form on this page. Let s create an About Us page. You ll notice all the options here are the same as a Contact page just without the contact form. So you would write your content right here in this Page Content field and you re all set. Feel free to take full advantage of all the tools within the WYSIWYG editor, like adding images or links to your content page. When you re done just click Save and Exit and your page should be live on your site! Let s go check it out.