What is 'Shopify Theme Development'?

Shopify Theme Development - What is it and why should you care?

Let’s break it down.

The first word in Shopify Theme Development is...

Shopify

Shopify is an easy-to-use eCommerce platform that helps sellers of any size or scale sell online.

Simply head to Shopify.com and in less than an hour, you can start selling. You can think of Shopify like a website builder. You use it to create pages for selling a product but unlike an eCommerce marketplace like Amazon, your Shopify website is your own store and you’re in control.

Shopify Themes

The next part, ‘theme’ represents the design template that determines your storefront.

So let’s say, you’ve got all your products loaded into your Shopify store but how do these products show up to the end users? Well, that is determined by the theme.

On any Shopify store there's a section where you can add, edit and publish different themes.

By switching the theme on my store, I can run the exact same product information through a different 'template' in order to completely transform the look of my product page and in fact, all of the pages on my store.

Shopify Theme Development

And finally, ‘development’. You can think of word development here as ‘coding’. On Shopify, we can click onto any one of our themes and click ‘edit code’. If you do this, you'll see that a 'theme' is simply a bunch of code files grouped into about 7 folders.

So putting all of these concepts together, a ‘Shopify Theme Developer’ is simply someone who understands and is able to work directly on this theme code, which in turn has a direct result on the storefront experience for the customer of that store.

So, what's in it for you?

Well, with an estimated 5+ million stores, Shopify is the world’s leading eCommerce platform.

Now, I know I said that Shopify is an easy-to-use platform that anyone can use to get started but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some huge businesses that use Shopify.

Billion-dollar companies like Gymshark, Kylie Cosmetics and Decathlon use Shopify to power their eCommerce websites as well as countless other multi-million dollar businesses.

The point is, Shopify is not just a platform for dropshipping solopreneurs but it serves as an eCommerce platform for proper eCommerce businesses as well.

So it stands to reason that many of the 5+ million sellers on Shopify will need some help with customising their storefront.

This is where I come in.

How I use Shopify to make $$

Rather than taking the risk of starting my own eCommerce business, I help existing businesses on Shopify update their storefront as a 'Shopify Theme Developer'.

While some do hire developers to work in-house, most Shopify stores don't need a full-time developer and so, when a Shopify theme development task does come up, Shopify sellers usually turn to agencies or freelancers to help them out.

And this is where the opportunity lies.

How hard is it to learn 'Shopify Theme Development'?

Shopify themes are coded with a combination of languages. These languages are HTML, CSS, Javascript, JSON and Shopify's own templating language called 'Liquid'.

JSON is a simple data format that anyone can learn quite easily while HTML, CSS and Javascript are the core languages that any frontend web developer needs to know.

Shopify Liquid is the only language here that is specific to Shopify but it's a very simple language to learn. As a 'templating language' you can think of Liquid as a simpler version of a programming language. It's been made by Shopify to slot in data from your store, including some extra features for logic like if-then statements and loops.

For exisiting frontend developers, adding knowledge of Shopify and Liquid code to their skillset opens up a whole new opportunity to provide web development services to some of the 5+ million stores on Shopify.

For newbies, the core skills of HTML, CSS and Javascript are relevant to any sort of website development and therefore, highly transferable into Shopify or any other platform.

Personally, I found Shopify a few years after first learning frontend development but that's not to say that I needed that amount of time to learn both.

I believe that anyone can get up and running with these kinds of skills in a matter of months. It really depends on the person and how many hours they put into it.

But, coming from someone who is a self-taught developer who got his first job after just a few months of learning, I can definitely say that you don't need to spend tens of thousands of dollars or years of your life to learn this skill.

In fact, you can get started today with either of my free mini-courses.

Until next time,

Chris