On to Phase two, The Planning Phase. When we begin each phase Shopify supplies us with resources that include videos and articles that we can use to give us ideas on how to develop and structure our themes and overall business, respectively. Also they invite speakers to do live Q & A sessions to give us their perspective and any tips to assist us in developing our themes.
So far the experience has been nothing less than amazing. I’m someone that needs a little hand holding when doing things that I’m unfamiliar with; and like most people the ability to do things in phases with a cookie crumb road map makes this journey so much easier to tackle.
I don’t know if this will be offered on a yearly basis but Shopify if you’re listening, I think it would be super cool to do this every year for newbies that want to dive in.
Now onto what this Phase entailed, as I said this was the planning Phase so one of the things we had to do was figure out a budget. I had no clue where to begin, I was really stuck doing this Phase because as far as I was concerned I didn’t need a budget. I’m not apart of an agency, I was bartering services with another woman in the program, shout-out to Monica; we partnered up for her to code my design and I would design her theme since we each lacked in the areas where the other person excelled.
That was a suggestion from the Shopify team by the way. We could partner with someone who had skills we didn’t have, and although I’m familiar with basic things like HTML and CSS, javascript is difficult for me. Add that with understanding how to use Liquid; which is Shopify’s coding language, I was clueless.
So back to planning a budget. I basically told the truth and explained that since I was bartering services I couldn’t see where I needed a budget. Then we had to explain how the features would benefit the merchants we chose to make our themes for, in detail. We had to make a timeline showing the road map from start to finish. I made a Trello board and submitted that.
Here is just a snippet of my Trello board:
The last part of the submission was to talk about what we learned from the merchants we spoke with about what their needs were. As long as you fill out the deliverable and submit something you make it to the next phase. There are no right or wrong answers just a lot of effort.
The next phase was my favorite and I was already ahead of the game. Phase 3 -Designing. See you in the next post.