This was a fun project and a little bit stressful. The fun was because I got to develop the Shopify theme from the ground up using the new Shopify Plus features, the stress was because they added several pages and features after I gave the them an estimate. We went a little over budget (it could have been much worse), but they were quite happy with the end result (I survey all my clients and they gave me a 9 out of 10).
My task was to develop a theme that my client (anonymous by request) could reuse for sites that feature affiliate products and sites that allow a user to get an instant rebate. The design was supposed to be identical to their existing site and if you compare them side-by-side, they’re really close. I also improved a lot of stuff along the way including some styles to make them easier to maintain and some JavaScript events to make them work better across all browsers.
The project had a couple challenges, the biggest of which was customizing the checkout process. This is a new feature with Shopify Plus and their documentation is lacking. In fact, I found a bug in them and suggested some improvements. It is nice that you can customize your checkout url and the look and feel more, but the downside is you can’t change the flow at all.
Let me just say that I’m still blown away that Shopify hasn’t added a good way to add meta data to site objects (products, pages, collections, links, etc.). You still have to use a browser plugin and themes are more prone to bugs because of it.
In the end, I’m happy with the final product.
