Custom Shopify Theme: Stages of Creation

In the days of high competition and widespread unification, individuality is becoming the strongest business resource. According to McKinsey statistics, 71% of users want online stores to be unique and personalized. When they don’t achieve the desired results, they get frustrated and go to competitors.

It may seem counterintuitive, but you can combine a standardized website building platform with customization. This approach allows you to attract and retain user attention with minimum time, effort, and financial resources. To implement this approach, you can upload custom theme to Shopify. But first, you need to start creating it. This is where Voodoo Digital, an agency specializing in the development, promotion, and support of Shopify stores, can help you.

Here’s how the process of creating a custom Shopify theme works.

Conceptualization & Planning

Unique brand positioning is a cool gimmick to capture the user’s attention. But you still need to keep it and maintain a solid reputation by providing potential customers with everything they want. That’s why the first step in developing a custom Shopify theme is planning.

To do this, you need to determine the conceptual foundations of your business. You can obtain most information by applying the standard 4P model, which experienced marketers see even in their dreams:

• Product: What exactly are we selling? How is our product useful for consumers? What unique advantages does it have compared to competitors?
• Price: What price category is our product in? How do we provide discounts? What other benefits do customers receive?
• Place: Where do we sell the product — online or in physical stores? How is the delivery done? Are there geographical differences in our pricing and product policy?
• Promotion: What communication channels do we use to communicate with users? What Tone of Voice have we chosen? What content do we plan to distribute online?

Once you have the answers to these questions about your business model, you can imagine what your future website should look like and how it should be built. This information will be vital for the development of a custom Shopify theme.

At the planning stage, a roadmap is developed. It sets clear deadlines or timeframes when certain work should be done — from creating the first visuals to the final release. The roadmap is convenient because it allows you to link each element and feature to specific teams and employees.

Another crucial planning step is a list of specifications and basic requirements. It includes:

• Unique brand elements that will express your business identity;
• Mandatory website functionality you are not willing to compromise on;
• Website structure that should be consistent with the company’s business model and product policy.

Design Phase

So, the future custom Shopify online store theme already exists in the mind of the project manager and in the form of sketches. That’s great! The only thing left to do is to convey this idea to all the other people who will work on the project. And at this step, you can’t do without visuals.

Wireframes will be the basic tool of the creative process in design. These are schematic images that show where certain functional elements will be located, how individual pages will be connected, and how sales funnels will work. They should show what the future custom theme will look like visually and demonstrate how the Shopify store will work from the business and user perspective.

Of course, to properly design Shopify store, you will need to develop mockups. Using mockups, you can see how ideas are transformed into reality by evaluating their strengths and weaknesses “in the natural environment.” It is a vital step that allows you to hone the future website design during meetings, consultations, and brainstorming sessions.

Development Phase

Website and software development is often perceived as a somewhat magical process. Not all project participants understand the technical details, but they don’t need to. It’s much more important to organize the workflow of developing a custom Shopify theme correctly. The following steps are essential:

• Creating separate teams that can work independently, preparing front-end, back-end, visuals, user experience, and interactive features for subsequent assembly into a finished product;
• Ensuring uninterrupted communication between the teams by organizing regular meetings, stand-ups, and informal discussions. This will help significantly reduce the number of errors and unexpected problems;
• Creating a unified project knowledge base that will include guides, a brand book, standard code and design elements, references, and sources of inspiration;
• Conducting regular reviews, evaluating the characteristics of the future product at different stages of development. Feel free to remove unnecessary things and integrate new ones.

If you wonder how to make a Shopify theme without engaging third parties, you need HTML and CSS experts, as well as a specialist in the platform’s template language, Shopify Liquid, written in Ruby. Of course, it is only the basic framework. The more features and functions a custom theme has, the more experts with broader knowledge you’ll need to involve in the project. That’s why a great idea is to contact real professionals from Voodoo Digital, who are ready to create a beautiful theme with great functionality for you in the shortest possible time.

Testing

Do you know about Murphy’s Law? If something can go wrong, it will definitely happen. And it’s not just a law of bad luck — it’s a basic rule of software testing before release. That’s why you start testing all possible scenarios at the stage of a minimum viable product (MVP) that can perform its task in any way.

Testing is a painstaking process that seems boring to most people. But it is a mandatory step to design Shopify store, without which you will lose customers due to user experience issues and broken sales funnels. Luckily, the platform makes this task a bit easier by offering a theme preview feature that allows you to step back and look at the overall picture, seeing the most obvious mistakes.

Internal testing works well. However, you should also show the future store to real users who will make test purchases in it. For this test, the format of a small focus group involving carefully selected people who match the characteristics of your target audience is perfect. By conducting the test, you can gather valuable information about:

• pain points;
• unmet needs;
• frustration moments;
• technical issues.

Testing is an iterative process. After fixing the shortcomings, you repeat it until you get a result close to the ideal.

Client Review and Approval

When specialists are confident in the results of their work, they can upload custom theme to Shopify and demonstrate it to the customer. Usually, at this stage, minor changes can be made to it in several stages of edits. Moreover, the developers optimize the settings and options of the theme, adjusting it to the features of the client’s business model.

If necessary, the theme is placed in the Shopify store. An ideal monetization model is developed for it — prices and terms of use are determined by market research. In this way, the customer can earn passive income by selling the permission to use the custom theme to other businesses.

Implementation

One of the last steps of the creative process is to connect the commercial part of the online store or migrate an existing business to a new platform. It is also a complicated and responsible task. All functional elements must work according to the plan and activate the relevant processes in the company’s operations. Therefore, the best solution is to entrust migration to professionals.

Developers continue to monitor the performance of a custom Shopify theme for some time after its release. Such control helps them obtain information about technical issues and user experience shortcomings in real time and make the necessary corrections promptly. They also monitor the effectiveness of the custom online store shell and make suggestions for improving it in the long run.

Post-launch support

Cooperation with a digital agency rarely ends immediately after the release. If you want your website to work perfectly, generate regular income, and require minimal attention from you, you will need support in the following areas:

• Regular updates of the code according to the updates of the Shopify platform;
• Solving current technical problems and restoring the site after major breakdowns (and they are inevitable, as the recent CrowdStrike breach showed);
• Technical support for website users.

Support and maintenance are often considered the final stage of the life cycle of an online store or a custom Shopify theme. But in fact, they serve as a restart point. Technologies, business practices, and markets change, forcing companies to adapt to new rules. The information gathered at the final stage will be crucial for launching new projects designed for the long term.

Summary

The instructions on how to make a Shopify theme may surprise or even shock unprepared users. It’s not much easier than creating an online store from scratch, although the platform still offers unique advantages in the form of templates, applications, payment gateways, and various commercial services. However, independent development can take time and resources that new businesses do not always have at their disposal. Therefore, the best option is to order a custom theme from the professionals at Voodoo Digital. We will make sure that your online store attracts users with its uniqueness and retains them with impeccable UX.

Custom Shopify Theme: Stages of Creation

In the days of high competition and widespread unification, individuality is becoming the strongest business resource. According to McKinsey statistics, 71% of users want online stores to be unique and personalized. When they don’t achieve the desired results, they get frustrated and go to competitors.

It may seem counterintuitive, but you can combine a standardized website building platform with customization. This approach allows you to attract and retain user attention with minimum time, effort, and financial resources. To implement this approach, you can upload custom theme to Shopify. But first, you need to start creating it. This is where Voodoo Digital, an agency specializing in the development, promotion, and support of Shopify stores, can help you.