Theme Customization and Custom Theme Development

Posted by:
ajencyin

Published on:
May 5, 2021

The best way to stand out in a crowded market is to create a visually stunning and engaging shopping experience. Customization allows you to tailor your site to your product line, branding, and to the preferences of both you and your target market.

Theme customization on Shopify strikes a balance between two frontend considerations: familiarity and originality. Giving customers just enough originality that you stand out, but not so much that finding what they want becomes unfamiliar or unnatural. After all, it is one thing to display your products beautifully. And it is another matter to make them easy to purchase, update, add, remove, manage, and list across multiple sales channels.

Simple Theme Customization

After you choose a theme that defines the basic look and feel of your online store, you can customize the theme to suit your unique brand. You get to customize the theme content and settings from your Shopify admin by using the theme editor. The theme editor includes a theme preview and a sidebar or edit menu that you can use to add and remove content, and to make changes to your settings. At the top of the Shopify theme customization window you will find a drop down for choosing a page template. This allows you to make changes in individual page templates that are used throughout your store and also helps in customizing various sections.

Custom Theme Development

As your business grows, you have the option to tweak your existing Shopify theme to cater to your store’s changing needs in a variety of ways. Changing or modifying the original Shopify theme code may seem like a good idea but in reality, there can be all sorts of downsides to customizations. With the help of a designer and developer you can modify your design and code that powers your theme to add new functions, or integrate third party apps to provide functionality that is not included with your theme already.

There is an endless amount of third party apps available to add to Shopify themes to fulfill specific functions that you might need or want. For example, we have embedded form.io for some Shopify websites. Form.io is an open source tool for combined form and data management platform. It enables web application developers to rapidly create the forms and resources using a simple drag-and-drop form builder interface. Using this tool we have implemented forms adding specific fields.

In Shopify it is difficult to add templates, plugins or theme files as we only have limited access. This makes it harder to even modify the templates and can only be done by a developer. You can edit your theme code to make detailed changes to your online store. Most of the files that make up a theme contain Liquid (Shopify’s templating language which is written in Ruby). Liquid is the backbone of all Shopify themes, and is used to load dynamic content to the pages of online stores. Theme files also contain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. However, excess bloat on website code slows down page load speeds. Additionally, certain apps add new elements to Shopify store pages. In order to prevent the code from making website slow, it has to be manually removed.

Instead of creating multiple templates to accommodate unique data or design elements, metafields in Shopify let you customize products, collections, blog posts, and even entire pages. Metafields allow frontend developers and designers to evolve their themes and products beyond what’s possible with the default data fields. This is the hidden superpower that helps drive some amazing custom designs.

We have extensive experience in customizing websites for our clients. With custom theme development, we have built a Shopify website on our own. The header, home page, cart page, testimonials page, product descriptions layout, etc. were implemented and customized by our developer. We have also created category specific collection pages and styled the sections and elements to match with the theme.

Benefits of Fully Custom Shopify Theme

A fully custom Shopify website provides you a user interface designed specifically for customer needs and your business objectives. These could range from changing the color, size or font of a specific element to changing the layout of an entire page.

Fast website speed

Only code that is necessary for your site’s operation is implemented, which ensures a fast load time and avoids code bloating. This is key to ongoing maintenance and scalability of your site, because with a steadfast code base in the back-end, added features won’t contribute to slowing things down in the front-end. Your custom site can be optimized to perform well with search engines.

Unique design

A custom build allows for a unique design that is specific to your industry vertical and reflects your brand. These details are what make your business stand out.

Functionality

With a custom build, focus is placed on the features that are essential to your business and so you are able to implement some functionality that the theme did not provide.

Easy modification

If you want to add something new or make some changes later on for your website, it is much easier for the developer as he has custom built the theme.

Custom design gives you an opportunity to create a user-centric ecommerce website. You can add small but meaningful touches that can increase your brand’s trustworthiness. With a custom theme, your business can achieve its goals in own way rather than fitting into defined rules of a pre-built theme.