When I started building Mimi and Hy‘s web store for my friend Allison, I wanted to prove to her that Shopify was better than her existing solution, so I took the standard and free Vogue theme and customized it with her colors and logo.
This was a great way to get a store up and running very quickly and prove my case. But even before starting, I knew trying to take someone else’s work and molding and shaping it into Allison’s vision for her site would be difficult. In fact, it would probably take longer to understand the way the designers of Vogue were thinking than it would to start from scratch.
If I start from scratch, I’m only dealing with the limitations of my abilities with HTML, Liquid (the templating language shopify uses), CSS and design.
I’ve learned from through trying to customize wordpress, drupal, joomla, mediawiki, vbulletin, and numerous other pieces of software that if you don’t really understand what each line of code is doing, you can’t make the software do what you want and then end result is a hodgepodge of cobbled together code.
There are a few wonderful projects that abstract complicated software and make it easier to build it from (almost) scratch. One of these is Thematic, the theme framework that powers this site. Over time, I’ll be changing it to look right for me, but right now it’s functional. I’m trying to make a similar theme framework for Shopify called Blankify. This should help bridge the gap between people starting from scratch and those trying to work backwards from someone elses beautiful mess.
Once I’m done with Blankify, I’ll be using it to make Mimi and Hy’s new theme and combine their shopify store and their main site, removing a point of confusion for users and providing their customers a better experience. That’s what building from scratch lets you do.
Building things from scratch creates a better user experience
When I started building Mimi and Hy‘s web store for my friend Allison, I wanted to prove to her that Shopify was better than her existing solution, so I took the standard and free Vogue theme and customized it with her colors and logo.
This was a great way to get a store up and running very quickly and prove my case. But even before starting, I knew trying to take someone else’s work and molding and shaping it into Allison’s vision for her site would be difficult. In fact, it would probably take longer to understand the way the designers of Vogue were thinking than it would to start from scratch.
If I start from scratch, I’m only dealing with the limitations of my abilities with HTML, Liquid (the templating language shopify uses), CSS and design.
I’ve learned from through trying to customize wordpress, drupal, joomla, mediawiki, vbulletin, and numerous other pieces of software that if you don’t really understand what each line of code is doing, you can’t make the software do what you want and then end result is a hodgepodge of cobbled together code.
There are a few wonderful projects that abstract complicated software and make it easier to build it from (almost) scratch. One of these is Thematic, the theme framework that powers this site. Over time, I’ll be changing it to look right for me, but right now it’s functional. I’m trying to make a similar theme framework for Shopify called Blankify. This should help bridge the gap between people starting from scratch and those trying to work backwards from someone elses beautiful mess.
Once I’m done with Blankify, I’ll be using it to make Mimi and Hy’s new theme and combine their shopify store and their main site, removing a point of confusion for users and providing their customers a better experience. That’s what building from scratch lets you do.