Theme Development

Whether you’re looking for a custom Shopify Plus build from the ground up which properly reflects your brand and the lifestyle of your customers, or to take your next steps in commerce by customising a premade theme to better suit your needs, our Shopify accredited team can make sure the platform delivers what you need to succeed.

What is front end development?

Each Shopify store is built upon the core functionality of the platform and augmented with apps, what makes the store yours, is your theme. Theme development is the technical and creative process of bringing your brand to life online.

Our front end developers (FED), in partnership with our back end development team (BED) and with support from our search engine optimisation (SEO) experts, make sure your site represents your brand, speaks to your customers and is ready to start climbing the search engine results pages (SERPs - that’s the last acronym for a minute, we promise).

Our theme development service

As Shopify Plus partners, and one of the only dedicated Shopify developers in the UK, we pride ourselves on our ability to make the platform sing and dance to whatever tune you want to play. With robust quality checks, SEO oversight and some fantastic designers, we offer a unique level of expertise and platform knowledge that can revolutionise your flagship store.

Bespoke theme development
Beginning with a discovery project to make sure we fully understand what you need, we then undertake a process of scoping, design and wire-framing to flesh out the project and agree the boundaries of the work before beginning development. After that, in collaboration with our team of quality assurance experts, we begin the process of bringing your ideal site to life.
Theme customisation
Just because you’re not ready to build something completely unique, doesn’t mean we skimp on the processes - we’ll still carry out thorough discovery and research projects to make sure you get the absolute best you can from the theme you’re working on - with the same attention to detail and quality assurance as if we were building from scratch.

What can theme development do for your brand?

In short, theme development is one of the key ways that you can immediately earn trust with a customer, but it’s also important in how they move through your site, how likely they are to make a purchase, how enjoyable they find that process and, therefore, whether they come back to do it again.

However, it’s more than just the numbers (as important as they are) - it also impacts how your brand is communicated and perceived online. Sure you could have a cookie cutter website that sells your products, just as you could simply sell your products through Amazon, or eBay or any other centralised platform. B

But the chances are, the reason you started to build your brand is that you care about your product, about the lifestyle it represents and the customers that buy it, and that means you want your site to say things about you which that cookie cutter site just can’t do. That’s why theme development is so important - because your theme is part of how you speak to your customers without ever meeting them.

Our theme development trendsetters

With decades of experience and platform mastery, our dedicated Shopify theme developers are dedicated to making Shopify work for our clients, taking advantage of all of its benefits and overcoming its limitations to make sure your brand gets the look, feel and performance you and your customers deserve.

Vince Hollywood Head of Engineering

Barry Goffett Head of Development

Liam McKenna Senior Front End Developer

Matt Bevan Senior Front End Developer

Josh Oakes Front End Developer

Steven Henderson Front End Developer

Matty Johnson Front End Developer

Jamie Baker Front End Developer

Michael Gainford Front End Developer

Richard Parnaby-King Back End Developer

Nathan Hogan Project Executive

Front End Development Services

With FED touching almost every nook and cranny of your website (we’ve asked them to stop, but they don’t listen), the number and reach of services is extensive - but all of them contribute directly to the functionality and usefulness of your site, and by extension it’s visibility in search.

→ Site Speed Development

Over the last few years, Google has been nudging webmasters to improve site speed - and so far they’ve done that with the carrot of a minor boost to rankings (though they won’t say much - thanks Google - it is likely to be a ‘deciding factor if all other things are equal’), but while a ranking bump is all well and good - the positive impact it has on conversion rates is far more important.

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→ Shopify 2.0 Upgrades

Shopify 2.0 (or Online Store 2.0) offers more opportunity for customisation, better app integrations and more besides. While the process of upgrading can be performed by most Shopify store owners, if you have a custom theme or unique integrations, our experts can help you make the transition seamlessly.

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→ Development Retainer

Whether it’s the result of a CRO experiment, a UX or UI review, your site has just hit the limits of its functionality and you need more, or any of a host of other reasons, it often pays to have development talent that you can access quickly to make the changes necessary to continue the growth of your brand.

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→ Shopify Checkout Customisation

While Shopify sites have always been customisable to an extent, there was a time in the pretty recent past when a Shopify site was more recognisably Shopify than any particular brand. The last area where that was the case was the checkout - but, for Shopify Plus customers, it doesn’t have to be anymore! Brands can now customise their checkout to better represent their brand and better suit their needs.

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→ Shopify App Development

Need to create Shopify functionality which can be implemented on your own, or multiple branded sites? Our experts can make sure there’s an app for that. Shopify's APIs allow the freedom and flexibility to create truly bespoke functionality outside the "standard" Shopify offering - that’s where Shopify App development comes in.

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→ Migration & Replatforming

Migration and replatforming is a lot like upgrading the location of your flagship store - you could be looking for more footfall, a location with a little more prestige, or a better return on your business rates - our team makes sure that everything moved to your new store, ready, gleaming and welcoming for the grand opening.

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→ Bespoke Tracking

Our commitment to the Shopify platform has many benefits for our clients - not least of which is our ability to wrestle the platform, and your analytics platform of choice, into submission to provide you with the data you need to make smart choices and grow your business.

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→ Inhousing Functionality

During the lifespan of a Shopify site, there’ll be times when growing and scaling a brand leads to you outgrowing some of the apps that were essential during your formative years. Whether that’s because it isn’t capable of scaling with you, or the need for other, more important features are beginning to cause performance issues, inhousing functionality can be the answer.

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→ UX & UI Development

From site navigation to all the fun things you can do with buttons, user experience and user interface development plays a vital role in how every single customer experiences your website (and interacts with it, to be fair). Providing the best customer experience isn’t just a ‘nice-to-have’, it can be the difference between a sale and an abandoned basket.

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