Blog
What is the optimal structure of Shopify theme settings?
As we develop a third preset for Lucid One and continue development of a new Shopify theme, we are contemplating how theme settings should best be laid out.
We've put together a little tiny survey to gather feedback from Shopify store owners and designers to try to get an idea of what people feel is the most logical structure.
Give us your input—it should take less than a minute.
How to optimise your Shopify site for mobile devices
In creating Lucid Mobile, our first, mobile-optimised Shopify theme, we’ve realised many Shopify store owners do not realise they can very easily add a 2nd, mobile-only theme to their site.
Since June 2011, Shopify has made it possible to install a dedicated mobile theme in parallel to your main theme. This is great for sites with themes that are not are not well-optimised for mobile devices.
Many recent themes are “responsive,” meaning they adapt elegantly and automatically to different screen sizes however there are many older or custom-designed themes that are not. The browsing experience with these sites when viewed on a mobile device can be cumbersome at best—and sometimes unusable!
The process of adding a mobile theme is easy:
- Login to your Shopify site at www.yoursite.com/admin
- Go to the Themes Manager at www.yoursite.com/admin/themes
- Browse to the Shopify Theme Store and click on Mobile to view the dedicated mobile themes
- Once you've found the theme you want, click Get Theme to install it on your store (you may need to enter your store’s yoursite.myshopify.com address)
- You can now tweak and customise the theme while it's un-published
- Once you're happy with it, click Publish
It’s really that easy!
And, it’s clear there’s a rapidly growing trend towards consumers making purchases from their mobiles. Is your Shopify site taking advantage of this trend?
Let us know if you have any queries or would like advice on getting your Shopify store optimised for mobiles.
Homepage A/B testing for The Monocle Order
When revising the design of a website, it is important to experiment with different versions rather than simply constantly changing the look-and-feel of the site.
Making regular changes is good but it's advisable to do it in such a way that you can track the results between the different versions.
If you just go ahead and make a big change, it can be difficult to measure the results as changes in buying habits from one month to the next can influence sales just as much as the changes you might make to the site. This can make it difficult to ascertain whether it was the revisions that made the difference or simply that it's a busier or quieter period than usual.
A/B testing allows you to test different versions at the same time by serving up your different versions randomly to different users.
We are currently running some homepage tests on the Monocle Order (you can see versions A—the original—B, and C in the images above). Our goal here is to see if, B, images of more "real" people will lead to better site interaction and, C, whether removing the emphasis on membership entirely from the homepage will draw more people in.
The interesting thing is that, rather than simply making some big changes and checking back in a month or two to see how they've gone, we're testing all three versions right now in unison. 33% of visitors see each version so we get valuable insight into which ones work better.
It's worth noting that this only works on relatively high-traffic sites as you need a reasonable number of clicks to be able to measure the differences and determine a winning version.
We will post a follow up with some results from this experiment.
LightSpeed Retail Point of Sale (POS)—now on iPad
We're super excited to announce that LightSpeed for iPad brings the LightSpeed Point of Sale experience to Apple’s acclaimed tablet platform, allowing retailers to showcase their products with Show & Tell and process transactions anywhere. LightSpeed for iPad is retail's first interactive point of sale system, combining next-level personalized selling with inventory scanning, wireless payments and the powerful retail workflows of LightSpeed.
Find out more: http://www.macpos.co.nz/blogs/news/4899112-lightspeed-retail-point-of-sale-pos-now-on-ipad
Video from The Monocle Order's New York City launch party
The Monocle Order had their official launch party on June 30th in New York City and had this fantastic video made. Pretty impressive for being made at a live event with lest than two weeks of editing. Impressive.
And love the soundtrack. If anyone knows who it is, please let us know in the comments.