Shopify theme customization
Using a pre-built theme as a base for the design of your ecommerce Shopify store is a common thing to do, but do you really want to keep it as-is?
When creating a website, there are two main elements that go into it: design and development. Both are important to achieve success and to reach your goals yet both should never be overlooked or not taken seriously enough.
You need good design to stand out from the crowd and not be “just another site” that looks the same as the others.
You need good developers that have the knowledge and skill to take any design and apply them to the code of a theme giving the site the uniqueness that it deserves.
Pre-built themes give you a lot of options with customizing your online store. Depending on the theme, you can usually change basic style settings like typography (fonts, font sizes, colors, etc.), the color scheme of the website and some also give a few different layouts for various elements like the header and footer. In addition, many themes come already designed in a style fitting various industries. Another great advantage is that you can pick and choose the type of sections to include in your pages. For instance, on the homepage you can select to show a video, a set of your featured products and/or collections, Instagram photos and much more.
But aside from that, you still “stuck” with many details of the design like the styling of buttons, more precise spacing of elements and/or their location on the page, adding more types of content or templates, etc. There’s a long list… And you don’t want to have a site that looks like the rest. We strongly believe that people who are shopping around, notice when a website is different and unique - even if it’s in their subconscious. These noticeable factors affect how they view your company and your products. Design makes a big difference.
A great start for purchasing a theme would be at Out Of The Sandbox. They create excellent themes, with lots of great functionality. They have a specific theme called “Turbo” that gives you even more control. We’ve worked with it as a basis for ecommerce stores many times and we highly recommend it. You can see Monkey Business and Next Gadget as examples of sites that used Turbo, and customized by us, but you can see more here.
Though there are limits, Shopify gives us, the developers, lots of control over the code. We have access to page templates, CSS files, Javascript files and more. Along with their unique scripting language, called “Liquid”, we have a lot of control over how we can retrieve content and display it on the page. We also have the know-how to give you the ability to add content that otherwise you wouldn't know how to do.
At Studio Umbrella, we’re all for creating a unique ecommerce website and not just setting up a pre-built theme. We love giving our clients something to be proud of and something that will, most importantly, be memorable to their customers and which will ultimately bring in more sales.
See the Shopify websites that we’ve built
If you're a designer who's looking for development services, don't hesitate to contact us! We'll be happy to help.
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