Unit 33 | P7 | Produce a personal development plan to help an individual prepare for increased use of e-business

Produce a personal development plan to help an individual prepare for increased use of e-business


I am already working on an ecommerce business, which will be based on the WordPress platform, specifically WooCommerce (WooCommerce is a plugin available for WordPress that is completely free to use, and this is what creates your website the store, basically. The theme/template that you are using must be compatible with WooCommerce in order for the store to function properly).

There are many things that need to be done in order to create a fully functioning ecommerce business, especially an online webshop.

  1. Think of a suitable domain name for the purpose of this webshop. (If you will be selling clothes, it is recommended that you think of a domain name that includes keywords of what customers might be using in search engines – like "clothes".) 
  2. Once you have thought of the domain name, you will need to purchase it. See the next point for the "best" domain name registrar and webhost. 
  3. SiteGround offers domain registrar, as well as webhosting services at a great price, and a 24/7 excellent customer service. You can purchase the domain name on their website, alongside the hosting. 
  4. Once you have the domain name and hosting, you will need to install the WordPress engine on your server. This can either be done by yourself, using the quick installation tools within your cPanel (a dashboard provided by SiteGround where you can manage your server settings) or you can hop on live chat with SiteGround's WordPress technicians, and they will be able to do this for you. 
  5. After you have WordPress installed, you will be able to navigate to your purchased domain and your website should load up. Since WordPress is a "blog engine", you will be greeted with a blog theme by default. 
  6. You can log in to your WordPress dashboard (where you can manage all the settings of the website) by navigating to your domain in the URL bar (address bar at the top of your browser) and writing "/wp-admin" at the end of your domain name. This will take you to the login page of your website, where you will be able to log in to your WordPress dashboard using the credentials that you have chosen, or what SiteGround have chosen for you. 
  7. Once you are logged in, usually what I do next is I navigate to "Appearance" on the left of the page, and choose "Themes". This will take you to the Themes page, where you will be able to choose your theme / template. 
  8. The next step would be to purchase the theme for your webshop. I use ThemeForest to do this. Once you are on the ThemeForest website, you can narrow down the search results by platform (WordPress) and then categories, within the WordPress platform. So for example, there are blog themes, e-commerce themes, portfolio themes etc. Once you have chosen your theme and purchased it, you can go ahead and navigate into your Profile, and Downloads, you will be able to download the theme files there, all packed up into a .zip file (a compressed file format, which is used to compress all the hundreds of thousands of files into a folder, and then reducing the actual overall file's size). 
  9. Once you have downloaded your theme's .zip file, you can go back to your WordPress dashboard, specifically to the Themes page, and on the top there will be a button labelled as "Add New". If you click that, you will be able to upload your theme files, so just simply click on the button, and in the window that pops up just find your theme file (usually located in your "Downloads" folder). 
  10. When the theme upload is finished, you will be able to navigate back to Appearance – Themes, and Activate your newly purchased theme. 
  11. If you take a look at your website now, you will be able to see that the new theme has been applied. 
  12. The next step would be to install the WooCommerce plugin. This is essential, as like I mentioned it above already, this is basically what sets up the webshop on your website. In order to install this plugin, you will have to navigate to the menu option labelled as "Plugins" on the left hand side of the page, and choose "Add New". 
  13. Once you clicked that, you will be able to see that there is a search bar in the top right corner of the page which you can use to search for plugins. 
  14. Write "woocommerce" in the search bar, and simply click "Install" on the first search result. 
  15. Once it has been installed, the "Install" button will change into an "Activate" button. Go ahead, and click that. 
  16. Now, your WooCommerce plugin is downloaded, installed and activated. 
  17. The way you continue setting up the webshop is completely based on personal preference. The main things would be to create the menu bar, create the categories and start creating the products that you wish to sell. There are multiple tutorials on how to do this all around the internet, and if you are stuck you can always get support from the theme's developer by navigating into your ThemeForest account, and under Downloads, find your theme and click on Support. This way you can communicate with the developer of the theme if you have any issues regarding setting up your website you can contact SiteGround as well, as they have Live Chat support that is available 24/7 & 365 days a year, or you can submit a ticket as well for which you usually get a reply within 5-10 minutes, if you don't have time to wait around for the chat. 

I personally think that for the increase in e-business, the main aspects I need to develop are more on the IT side of it; learning programming languages, such as CSS and HTML to be able to aid my route of being a full-time web designer.

The skills I already have are quite broad in regards to e-business, and they are as follows;
  • WordPress 
  • Web Hosting 
  • Domain Names 
  • Email Accounts 
  • Setting up a website 
  • Maintaining a website 
  • Search Engine Optimization 
  • Basic HTML knowledge 
  • Basic Python knowledge 
  • Microsoft Suite 
  • Ebay seller accounts 
  • Amazon seller central 
  • Managing feedbacks 
  • Customer support 
  • Adobe Photoshop 
  • Adobe Illustrator 

The skills that I need to develop in order to be a confident web designer, developer and software engineer;
  • Java 
  • JavaScript 
  • CSS 
  • C++ 
  • HTML 
  • Python 
  • SQL 
  • PHP

Comments

Post a Comment