Build Your Site & Shop: Beginner's Guide to Shopify & Website Design

This course positions itself modestly, and that modesty is its greatest strength. Mimi Chao, who runs the illustration studio Mimochai and previously worked as a project lead at a design agency, spends the opening minutes explaining what the class will not do: no coding, no deep UX theory, no promise of an award-winning custom site. That upfront honesty sets a tone that carries through the rest of the 112 minutes, and it means the course rarely oversells what a template-based site can achieve.

Structure and Method

The class follows a logical build order: overview of the Shopify dashboard, theme selection, a written site plan, then hands-on setup of products, pages, navigation, theme settings and the homepage. The site plan exercise, done in a plain Google Doc covering goals, target audience and a content outline, is treated as the real deliverable of the class, not an afterthought. This ordering matters because Chao explicitly recommends watching the theme-picking and planning lessons together, since choosing a template before knowing what content it needs to hold is backwards.

The most useful technique in the course is the homepage wireframe: a simple table mapping out which modules (hero image, best sellers, content highlight, follow-us section) will appear in what order, checked against what the chosen theme actually offers. Chao demonstrates this by comparing her build against Everlane's homepage and a competitor's tea shop site, then stripping out modules she doesn't need, like testimonials and an image gallery that doesn't work well on mobile. This habit of constantly toggling to the mobile preview while editing is a small but genuinely practical detail many beginner-facing courses skip.

Where It Delivers and Where It Doesn't

The product page walkthrough is concrete rather than abstract. Chao uses her own picture book as a live example, explaining why she chose three bullet points over a paragraph of specs, why five to six photos is enough, and why photo order should mimic how someone would physically handle the object (cover, then inside pages, then back and spine). This kind of specific reasoning, rather than generic "add good photos" advice, is where the course earns its keep.

Where it thins out is anything past the basics. Marketing, SEO, and third-party app integrations are acknowledged and then waved past, with Chao repeatedly saying "that's not what this class covers." The bonus Adobe Portfolio segment is useful mainly as a contrast case, showing why a non-ecommerce portfolio site doesn't need Shopify's overhead, but it moves quickly and covers less ground than the main Shopify sections.

The comparison between free and paid themes, and the closing Shopify-versus-Squarespace discussion, are the parts likely to save a viewer real money. Chao is candid that she now uses a free theme (Dawn) for her own store after years on a paid one, and that Squarespace may suit non-ecommerce sites better. For a beginner trying to decide where to even start, that kind of unvarnished platform comparison is worth more than most of the module-by-module screen recording, and it's the reason this course reads as trustworthy rather than promotional.

What you will learn

• ·How to navigate Shopify's dashboard (orders, products, collections, inventory, analytics) and pick between free and paid themes
• ·How to write a site plan document covering goals, audience and a page outline before building anything
• ·How to build out product pages, including bullet-point specs, image sequencing and digital-download attachments
• ·How to set up collections, blog posts, nested navigation menus and standalone pages like About and Privacy Policy
• ·How to customize a homepage by adding, removing and reordering template modules based on a simple wireframe
• ·How to compare a free theme against a paid one (Turbo) and decide if Adobe Portfolio suits a non-ecommerce portfolio site instead