Best Practices for Building SHOPLINE Themes
To improve your theme development experience, SHOPLINE has set up a collection of best practices that you can use when developing themes and setting up tools and processes.
Designing and Coding Themes
To create the best customer experience and keep your merchants' stores fast, accessible, and easy to find, you need to consider several factors. When building the Seed theme, SHOPLINE developers identified principles and best practices you can follow:
- Templates, Sections, Blocks: Utilize the SHOPLINE theme structure to create modular, highly customizable themes that help merchants achieve their business goals. Discover tips for dividing theme templates into sections and blocks, and how to determine the appropriate level of detail for theme components.
- Performance: Speed is vital for the success of the merchants you support and their customer experience. Understand how to improve and test theme performance.
Theme Development Principles
Besides the best practices listed above, you should also think about the following theme development guidelines.
These principles apply whether you are creating themes for individual merchants or the SHOPLINE theme store.
| Principle | Description |
|---|---|
| Excellent Performance | Themes should be designed for speed, ensuring that merchants and their customers enjoy a fast and reliable online shopping experience. Minimize JavaScript usage and leverage modern, native web browser features for most functionalities. |
| Custom-Built | Each theme’s layout, style, and features should be tailored and optimized for specific merchants or merchant groups. Your theme should provide merchants with a set of tools optimized for their target audience and products. Specialized themes offer more value than generic ones. |
| Provide a Top-Notch User Experience | With the growth of SHOPLINE stores, themes can set industry standards and shape e-commerce user experience patterns. Prioritize quality in theme design, keeping the customer in mind. |
| Mobile-First | Since most online store traffic comes from mobile devices, prioritize mobile design throughout the theme-building process. |
| Accessibility | To deliver the best experience to a diverse range of merchants and customers, themes must incorporate accessibility best practices from the beginning. |
| Easy Customization | Themes should enable merchants to personalize and showcase their brand to potential customers. They should be flexible with well-designed options for customization while being simple to manage, allowing merchants to quickly set up their stores and start selling products. |
Was this article helpful to you?
