Themes

Custom Shopify themes

Themes written from scratch or rewritten on top of a paid one, with sections and blocks your team uses without calling me. The real deliverable is not the design: it is that you can build a new page next Tuesday.

Facts checked on 21 October 2026

What makes the difference two years later

Two themes can look identical on delivery day. On one, the client builds a landing page in twenty minutes; on the other, they ask for a quote every time they want to change a line of copy. The difference is in how the sections and blocks were split, and that does not show in the mockup.

My rule: one section per page intention, not per row of the design. Three text-and-image bands that differ only in which side the photo is on are one section with a setting, not three sections. And the other way round: one section with forty settings nobody understands is split just as badly.

What is always included

Sections with sensible defaults, which look right before anything is configured.
Capped blocks, because a carousel that accepts thirty blocks will end up with thirty.
Copy in the settings, not in the code, and names in your team’s language.
Images with declared dimensions and the main one loaded early, which is half of performance.
Whatever repeats across pages in metaobjects: the client edits it once and it changes on 200 product pages.

Performance from the start

A fast theme is not achieved by optimising at the end. It is achieved by not introducing the problem: not loading the main image inside a carousel that boots with JavaScript, not walking entire collections in Liquid to calculate something that fits in a metafield, and not repainting the cart by hand when you can ask for the rendered section.

In projects there are three themes built this way, and on the code page are this site’s own numbers, measured against the deployed site.

Frequently asked questions

Custom theme or a customised paid one?

A customised paid one, almost always, and I say that even though it bills less. A custom theme earns its place when the paid one has been modified so much that updating it is impossible, or when the brand needs something no theme in the store does.

Can I still update the theme afterwards?

If we start from a paid theme and the changes live in new sections and in a file of their own, yes, carefully. If the theme is written from scratch, updates are yours or mine, but they do not come from a vendor.

Is design included?

I do not design. I work with your design, your agency’s, or the theme’s. What I do is the front-end, and where the design clashes with how Shopify actually works, I say so before building it.

In the glossary

Liquid — Liquid is the template language Shopify themes are built in. It runs on Shopify’s server before the HTML is sent to the browser, so it can read products, collections, the customer or the cart, but it cannot react to anything that happens on the page afterwards.
Sections and blocks — Sections are the modules of a Shopify template that a client can add, reorder and configure from the editor; blocks are the pieces that go inside a section. Since Online Store 2.0 they work on any template, and they are what makes a theme maintainable without a developer.
Metaobjects — Metaobjects are content types you define inside Shopify, with their own fields: a size guide, a material, a store location, an author. They exist in their own right, are referenced from products or pages through a metafield, and the theme renders them like any other object.

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