5 Things You Need to Know When Designing a Shopify Store

Here at PHP Genie, we’re big fans of Shopify. After all, it’s good value for money, adaptable and extremely aesthetically pleasing. What’s not to like?

If you are looking to join the 50,000+ businesses that use Shopify to host their site, have a little Shopify design help first. Here are five things you need to know:

#1 – You don’t need to be a computer whiz

Shopify’s popularity owes a great deal to its simplicity and usability. As a result, it’s chosen by thousands of different people of varying technical abilities. Regardless of your skills and experience, you can create a website that’s highly functional, looks good and, crucially, brings in revenue.

#2 – But you do need some creativity

Whether that creativity comes from you or from a knowledgeable agency is up to you. But it’s got to come from somewhere. Shopify’s wide range of features and themes mean that you’ll be able to design something that looks good and suits your brand, but if you want to really stand out a creative touch is essential.

It may take a little time to play around with some of the templates available to you, but with some creativity and a little help from Shopify’s excellent, helpful forum you’ll be able to build a website that suits you and looks good.

#3 – You might find the blog wanting

We’ve spoken in the past about how important a blog is to the long-term health of your site.

And although the blog that comes with Shopify websites is perfectly adequate, it doesn’t compare favourably to some other providers like, for instance, WordPress.

Here’s what you should know about the Shopify blog:

• It has archiving issues: You can’t list blogs by month

• Blogs can only be tagged in a ‘flat’ structure: That means it’s tougher to link relevant blogs to another.

• There are no featured images: so any featured images have to sit in the ‘excerpt’ section

• The two blog templates are inflexible: the multi-post ‘archive’ function can’t marry together with the slightly more aesthetically-pleasing single-post function

• The sidebar can be tough to edit: some people find that the sidebar is relatively inflexible

It should be stated that these aren’t terminal problems. It’s perfectly possible to create an engaging, customer-generating blog with Shopify, but there are issues that you will have to deal with.

#4 – There aren’t custom image sizes

In a platform like WordPress, you’re allowed to edit the size of images you upload them into your web page – and so ensure that your page looks just right. Shopify, however, doesn’t allow you to enjoy custom image sizes.

You are afforded a number of different image dimensions – from 16×16 all the way up to 600×600 – but it’s not as adaptable with its images as some other providers.

For the vast majority, this isn’t a problem at all. After all, the system is flexible enough to build a truly impressive site and the simplicity of Shopify is one of the platform’s greatest traits.

#5 – You can find this all out for free

Of course, one of the best things about Shopify is that you can discover all of these quirks for free. It’s no-obligation 14-day trial means that you can play around with the platform and see if you can create something that suits your brand. Talk to us about Shopify today

At TheGenieLab, we live and breathe all things Shopify. For more information about how this platform can help your agency or brand to grow its offering, talk to us today.