We advocate for custom development when building a new site or re-theming an existing one ultimately to ensure you’re building a quality website. Here are a few reasons why custom prevails over pre-made.

‍Unique Brand Identity

Your brand deserves to stand out in the online marketplace, and a custom Shopify theme allows you to create a truly unique and memorable brand identity. By tailoring every design aspect to specific requirements, we ensure that your website reflects your brand's personality, values, and aesthetics. 

‍Tailored Functionality

‍With custom development, we can build and integrate features and functionalities specifically tailored to your business design and operational processes.  

Check it out:

• Heyday’s Canning Co’s “beanfetti” explosion on their about page. 
• Spindrifts animated fruit on each product page. 

A premade theme definitely would not provide you with those fun brand-centric experiences. 

‍Scalability and Future-Proofing

As your business grows and evolves, so should your website. Custom development allows us to future-proof your Shopify theme by building a solid foundation that can easily adapt and scale with your business. 

Pre-made themes are built to appeal to the most amount of businesses, and with that comes tradeoffs like a bloated code base. These themes are packed with unnecessary features and design elements that may not align with your brand. Ultimately leaving you with a mess of features and a fragile site. 

You can certainly build and customize on top of one, but that weak foundation will start to unveil in presenting bugs the more and more it is poked at.  We call this a dreaded Franekensite.

‍Enhanced Performance and Optimization

With a custom developed theme, we can streamline your theme's code, optimizing it for superior performance and faster page load times. This ensures an exceptional user experience, boosts search engine rankings, and increases conversion rates, ultimately maximizing your online success.

‍Support and Maintenance

When you choose custom development, you benefit from ongoing support and maintenance from our dedicated team. We are intimately familiar with every line of code and intricacy of your theme, enabling us to provide prompt assistance, updates, and enhancements whenever needed. There’s peace of mind knowing that your website is in the hands of experts who understand your unique requirements.

By choosing custom development, you invest in a solution that truly represents your brand, delivers exceptional functionality, and sets you apart from the competition.

For you deep divers, a further rant on this is here.

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Of course! While the process is similar to building a site for a new company, a redesign project requires more discovery time for us to gain backend knowledge of your existing product structure and current customizations. 

We typically (especially for e-commerce sites) kick off redesigns with a discovery phase to essentially “pop the hood” on your site and see what we’re working with. This allows us to jump in quickly, begin sifting through the site and create a plan for the new build. It also allows us time to familiarize ourselves with your business and consult on potential development solutions to operational headaches.

Not us! We only build unique custom themes. This is because we want every project we work on to deliver a long-lasting site with a strong foundation.

Very little. We just need assurance we’re working from approved designs and that your process with the design team is complete. From there, we handle the transition and get everything we need directly with your team. 

No. We are a web development company.  If this was a home, think of us as the builders and your design team as the architects. 

We take the thoughtful web designs that they’ve hand-tailored for your brand and implement them into a fully operational website that ultimately functions as well as it looks. 

We are the backend, behind-the-scenes crew. The people who make all the technical customizations—like ensuring customers can easily navigate your site to find exactly what they’re looking for, from their initial browse to checkout—work.

We can and do, but only on a retainer basis with a thorough discovery phase.  This allows us to develop a foundational knowledge of the site before troubleshooting issues.

If you’re looking for minor updates to your existing site (that we did not build), we probably aren't the best fit. However, we do have a process in place to take over support on an existing site that starts with a discovery phase. Reach out for more details. 

Yup! We realize the two-team process would be slow for something small and more often than not, the design team does not want to be contracted for something tiny like this. Once you have a baseline site built, it’s very easy for us to take over on design guidance if you’re just looking for a new feature or page to build. 

Examples of something we would do: 

• You want to add a free shipping tracker to your cart drawer. 
• You want to change the layout of your product gallery.
• You need a new block layout for your modular landing page. 
• You need a new page built, and we can utilize layouts from other pages.

Examples of something we would not do:

• You’ve rebranded and you want to re-design the site to match.
• Comprehensive redesigns of most pages throughout the site.

When in doubt, ask. If it’s something we feel we can do, but verges on the line… we’ll run it by the design team to make sure they’re comfortable with us handling it.

Before we hit the launch button, we schedule a training session to review the site and teach you how to manage the content.  

And to ensure you remember all the finer details, we also thoroughly document “How to” guides with videos and step-by-step guides. Providing a great resource for reminders or new team member training down the road.

SEO is a broad term, and we only touch on some aspects of it in development. We always build the code structure using best practices and ensure that schema markup, like product schema, is in place.

Organic SEO is highly dependent on content generation and strategy. A lot of research goes into determining the search terms you want to be found for, then write your copy to align with that. This is not offered in our scope of work.

In any platform, you can implement your own SEO strategies by editing product titles, meta descriptions, writing blog posts, etc. If you’re launching a new site, we’ll get you set up correctly in Google Search Console to make sure Google knows you’re ready to be indexed.

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