There are few better platforms for building a website than Shopify, it can take one of the scariest tasks for many businesses and simplify it down to the level where a relatively computer savvy person can create something to be proud of. While it is not a drag and drop platform, it does provide navigational source as to how to build a functioning site, and with the proper know how many deep complexities of the platform can be explored. Whether you need a store to sell your products, or a platform to clearly show your service offerings, these tips and tricks can take you to the place you need to go when building a site on Shopify.
Use Shopify Help. If I had to say something again it would be USE SHOPIFY HELP! In my opinion they are one of the most useful, competent, and friendly customer service teams I have ever run into. They are willing to talk for a quick minute or a long hour, from topics such as inserting a button or entering html into your code, ranging to payment structures and finding you outside applications for what you need. Something that strikes me as exceptional about their customer service is that when they don’t know how to complete an objective they will admit they need help, get the help from another department, then relay the information to you, (In one instance a Shopify Help Team member spent an hour making me videos on how to install code into my website for an application I needed that day, and they were pretty funny). I use the Shopify help team nearly every time I have a question and they pretty much have always come through for me.
Learn how to categorize your site between Pages, Collections, Products, Tags, and Navigation Tabs. It can seem a bit overwhelming, but if you spend some time learning the progression flow of Shopify’s platform it will greatly increase your speed in the long run.
If you can’t figure out how to build something, such as a product upload option, there is often an APP that will service you, and in many cases the price of the app easily pays for itself as opposed to you spending long hours trying to figure out how to do it yourself or hiring a coder.
Take advantage of all the Alt Tags and Meta Descriptions, they will really help your SEO, are quick to do, yet very easy to forget about. Setting these tags and descriptions will really help you rank higher for many different factors on google. Check this out for some expert tips for your marketing.
If you are going to be making major changes to your site save a copy of the theme as it is, often times when making major changes things don’t turn out like you hope and you want to revert back to how it was, saving a copy of your theme allows you to do just that.
It is very likely that you will eventually need to feature a subset of collections on a page, (imagine you have a collection, for example hats, and you want one page to show MLB Hats, one to show NBA Hats, and one to show NFL Hats, you will need separate special pages to feature those each of those subsets of the collection), when you do run into this issue read this https://help.shopify.com/themes/customization/collections/featuring-collections-using-link-lists, and talk to a Shopify help team member, it will save you A TON of time, trust me on that one.
Write your blogs on the Shopify platform, while many companies already have a wordpress or blogger account, (and I am not saying to stop posting to those), take advantage of the good categorization and visually appealing layout of the shopify blog pages.
If you need your products to have different options such as a one line message, a 3 line message, or a size selection the way to do it is by creating product types which can easily be created and categorized.
You can preview and see how changes to your site impact the layout both on the desktop and on mobile devices, make sure that they are functional and visually appealing on both.
These are just some tips and tricks that have helped me, every time you build a website on Shopify it gets a little easier, but it is always nice to have a guiding hand to learn from someone else’s mistakes. I hope you enjoyed, and thank you for reading.
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