Posts Tagged ‘SEO for Shopify’

4 Tips for Shopify Theme Customization

October 5th, 2017

Shopify allows users to choose from hundreds of available themes to use for their e-commerce store. These choices let you truly find a theme that matches your vision for your Shopify store. If you still are not satisfied and want a truly customized experience when it comes to your Shopify theme, then you should follow these four tips that will help you with your Shopify theme customization.

1)    Understanding Liquid

Shopify platform allows you to take an existing theme and make modifications to it to create your own customized theme. Whether that is the route you want to take or you want to create a new theme simply from scratch, you need the knowledge of Liquid. Even the most basic themes require Liquid, which is a Ruby-based coding language that is extremely customizable. If you have a ton of experience with Liquid, the sky is the limit for what you can do with your Shopify store. If you are unfamiliar with Liquid, you can study some online tutorials before getting started.

2)    Matching SCSS with templates

Shopify has a very flexible templating that allows users to have a very modular approach to CSS and markup. It is always better to match your CSS structure with the template structure of the online store. This helps not just with the Shopify development but also help with Shopify maintenance to keep the webstore running in an optimized manner.

3)    Familiarize yourself with Timber

Don’t know how to set up a Shopify framework from scratch but want something unique and original? In that case, knowledge of Timber might be just the thing you need. Timber is a bare-bones code that can be edited using Liquid. This way, you do not have to start all the way from zero.

The best way to explain Timber is constructing a house but you can only put up four walls. The outer construct is already provided for you. Timber allows you to put your room wherever in the house you like.  With Timber, the process of creating a new theme becomes simplified and you can take care of more complex customizations at a later time.

4)    Re-using styles for Check-out page

In Shopify, you do not have any control over the markup however you do have control over the CSS. You have to keep in mind to over-write the default styles that are there from the beginning. The best method is always to use code-re-use. Have a checkout style sheet prepared in your CSS folder. It also gets the output to your theme’s asset folder.

Above are just a few tips that can help you with the customization of your website and its theme. If you want professional assistance in creating a truly unique and remarkable theme for your Shopify website, Clap Creative is your perfect partner for this endeavor. At Clap Creative, we offer Shopify theme customization service that will make your Shopify store truly pop up and look unique. Our team of designers takes your vision and turns it into reality.

Apart from this, Clap Creative also offers services like Shopify web design, Shopify development, and Shopify maintenance and support services. To know more about our services or to get a quote, Contact us today.

Is Shopify the Right Platform for Your E-Commerce Webstore?

September 21st, 2017

Once you have made the decision to start your online store, the next decision they are faced with is which platform is the right one for them to develop their webstores? If it is your first e-commerce store, then it only adds to your confusion. You can go online and visit various forums and ask other users of their experiences. There are loyal defenders of each e-commerce platform all over the internet and that might make it even more difficult for you to decide. If you want to go in depth to know what Shopify has to offer and decide if Shopify Development is the right path for your webstore, read on below.

Shopify is an easy to use the platform and if you are someone that wants to start selling immediately, it may seem like the perfect option. There are certain aspects of Shopify web design and development that you need to take a closer look at to understand what they offer for you. Each one of these features of Shopify makes it different gives some value addition to the users.

Let us discuss them in detail –

Store Management

Shopify makes store management a breeze, especially for first-time webstore owners. It creates accounts and stores the information of your customers that you can later use for the purpose of remarketing for various promotional offers.  However, you may need to use external tools like Google Analytics for more in-depth reporting of your website’s performance as the Shopify’s own user behavior reporting does not match up to the detailed reporting of GA.

Shopify also has features that aid in order fulfillment. It has pre-set plugs Amazon, Super Logistics etc. With Shopify, you can set-up an entire communication protocol that starts from sending thank you email to your customers to tracking the dispatch and shipping details. Your customers even get the emails that their products have been delivered.

Shopping Cart Features

When you use Shopify for your webstore, you get a free SSL certificate that makes users trust your webstore and feel more confident about entering their card information there. You have the option to integrate over 50 payment gateways on your checkout page including all-time popular PayPal. You can automatically control shipping costs or offer free shipping by integrating with carriers like FedEx, UPS etc. If that was not enough, Shopify supports 50+ languages too. Shopify has the abandoned cart recovery feature too that reminds those prospective customers of the items that they added to cart but did not buy.

Shopify Storefront

Shopify gives you hundreds of themes to choose from to customize your webstore. Although you can select these themes yourself, if you want to stand apart from other Shopify sites, you can avail the services of a Shopify web design company to help create that perfect tailor-made theme especially for you. Blogging is an important way of getting traffic and engaging your customers with content. Shopify offers a ready to go blogging platform too.

Your webstore will be mobile ready without much effort from you. Shopify sites are responsive and work perfectly on all kinds of devices.

Online Marketing Tools

Shopify helps your online marketing efforts as well. You get a ready to submit the sitemap.XML file that once submitted into the search console will get your website indexed faster. You can set customer H1 tags, Title tags, and meta-tags. This makes your SEO for Shopify that much more effective. Through Shopify, you can also offer discount coupons to your customers that will help you entice them to buy from you.

Shopify will aid you in converting your website visitors with the help of email marketing. Using email marketing all those users to signed up on your site but left without purchasing anything can be sent emails with promotional offers. Some other features include the option for customers to leave product reviews and integration with several popular social media platforms.

 

Now that you know a bit more details about Shopify, you can make a more informed decision as to whether it is the platform you want to use for your webstore. Remember, if you choose Shopify to start your e-commerce store, you need to periodically keep it optimized by availing Shopify maintenance and support services. This will ensure your webstore works as good as new.

How to Choose the Perfect Theme for Your Shopify Store

September 15th, 2017

Shopify is an extremely popular platform when it comes to designing e-commerce stores. It offers you so many themes to choose from and the options of adding your own customizations to these themes. With hundreds of themes to choose from, how do decide which theme is the best for your Shopify web design? Below are some of the things you should definitely look for when deciding on the perfect theme for your Shopify e-commerce site.

  1. It Must Be Responsive

Every design available in the Shopify theme store is mobile friendly. It is a prerequisite when it comes to Shopify accepting any theme on its store. However, there are some developers that choose to hide a few features on devices with smaller screen resolutions like smartphones and tablets.

Mobile traffic consists of almost 50% of all the visitors on e-commerce websites. Not showing all the features and functionalities of your website to such a large part of your audience can be a mistake for you.

You must also find a perfect balance so that you do not overload your website with too many images and extensions that decrease the page load speed which can lead to a degraded user experience.

  1. Don’t Overcomplicate the Navigation

Many e-commerce store owners have the complaint that they get a lot of traffic on their website but it does not convert into customers. One of the major problems that visitors on your website may face is navigating through the different levels of menus to get to the products they are looking for.

During your Shopify development and design process, make your menu and navigation as simple as possible and try to reduce as many steps as you can between your homepage and the product page. Using a mega menu would be suggested if you have too many categories, brands or products that you sell on your website.

  1. Beautiful Blog

Blogs are extremely important for getting your visitors engaged with your website and for generating organic traffic to your website. A blog is a very effective tool for SEO for Shopify. However, some designers and developers can over look this importance during their Shopify design and development process.

Your blog should have beautiful banner images that make it look appealing. There should also be certain features that make it SEO friendly like the option to add tags. As per Shopify guidelines, a featured blog image along with a feature image is displayed on the homepage so your designers need to make sure it goes well with the overall website theme.

  1. Option to add Videos

Adding videos to your e-commerce site can make it look that much more appealing. Apart from the aesthetics, adding videos about your company and the products can help engage your customers even more with your website.

You must choose a theme that allows your designers to add videos on any page and in any section of the online store as and when needed. You can add videos on specific product pages and a company introduction video on the about us page.

  1. Use of Large Images

The usage of large beautiful images makes your website stand out. Using high-quality images of your products is the perfect window dressing needed to appeal to online customers that are more enticed by visuals rather than the written word. The theme you choose must have large imagery to achieve this desired effect.

As stated in one of the points before, using too many high-quality images on your website can result in the reduction of your website speed. While using images on your site, it is important to maintain a healthy balance and to not go overboard with every product image available.

 

Conclusion:

I will leave you with these words. You must choose a theme keeping in mind which products you are selling and which industry or category you belong to. Even if a theme meets all the above criteria, it still may not be right for the kind of Shopify store you want to be developed. Know your business and target audience and then pick Shopify theme customization that is needed.