Shopify storefront design

Liquid, CSS, Responsive design

Desktop and mobile overview of the Participate Shopify storefront

I worked with a colleague to build the company’s Shopify storefront. I managed the theme code and website design while my colleague managed photography and new product listings.

Designing the storefront

I saw that Liquid displays HTML elements with logic written in Ruby. I was able to take full control of finer details with existing CSS stylesheets.

I envisioned a home page that featured all available products in a responsive grid. Shopify's pre-built theme only allowed us to add three featured items, so I adjusted the theme template code to add more.

Old Shopify storefront design
Wireframe sketch of the product grid and simple menu I wanted

An intermediate photo choice worked well, but it didn't mesh with the default menu.

I set up a copy of our theme for QA testing and found the sections of code I needed to change. Once I understood how the theme was built, I used existing pieces of code to structure a new home page design.

Three blocks in Shopify storefront
Code controlling the three product blocks

Within a liquid tag, I could add as many new product object copies as we needed

The properties inside liquid tags needed to be updated each time a new featured item was created so that the pages and images linked together correctly. I added these new key-value pairs in a JSON file so they would render on screen.

Documentation

After several instances of updating the code on my own, I wrote documentation on the process for my colleague so that he could take ownership of the storefront and free up my time to address other issues.

Snapshot of color-coded documentation written for a design colleague

Snapshot of color-coded documentation written for my colleague

Results

Overall, our design upgrades resulted in a cleaner user experience and an easy reference for all products the company had on sale.

Final view of the storefront redesign

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