Your shop's look

The default theme

Every shop starts on Storeforge's built-in theme. Under Online store you can pick a colour scheme, fonts, button and corner styles, and a banner photo. There is no logo upload yet. If you are moving from another shop, Products, Import can bring your logo across with the rest of its look. If you paste in a colour that's too light to read against white text, it's automatically darkened until it passes an accessibility check, and you're shown readable options.

Ready-made themes

Online store, Ready-made themes has eight starting points: Market, Atelier, Fresh, Studio, Coastal, Bloom, Statement and Bookshop. Picking one fills in the colours, fonts, button shape, photo shape, page background and corners, and the preview changes straight away. Nothing goes live until you press Save changes, and you can still change any single setting afterwards. A look never changes your words, photos or sections. If your shop uses its own brand colour (copied from your old website), that colour stays on buttons and links.

To add banners, featured products, reviews and more, see Sections.

Custom themes

If you need your shop to look like a specific hand-built design, a custom theme can be built for you (talk to us about this). A custom theme still runs the real Storeforge cart, checkout, order book and everything else underneath, it only changes the look.

Editing a custom theme yourself

A custom theme can declare which bits are yours to edit, words, photos and colours, right there in Online store with a live preview before you save. For bigger changes, you (or a developer) can download the whole theme's code, edit it, and upload a new version. Uploads don't go live straight away: we review them first and let you know once approved, and any earlier version can be restored instantly if you want to go back.

One-pagers and static sites

Storeforge can also host a simple one-page site alongside, or instead of, a full shop.

Blog posts

Under Online store, Blog posts you write news, guides and updates. Press Add blog post and fill in a title and the content. You can also add an excerpt (a short summary for the blog page), a cover image, an author, tags, and a web address, which is made from the title if you leave it empty. Each post has a Search engine listing card too.

Under Visibility, tick Published to show a post. Publish on is in South African time: leave it empty to publish now, or pick a future date and the post stays hidden until then. Leave Published unticked to keep a draft. The list shows each post as Draft, Scheduled or Published.

Published posts show on your shop at /blog, with pages for each tag, a feed at /blog/feed.xml, and are included in your shop's sitemap for Google. If you moved from Shopify, old /blogs/ addresses open the same post when the web address matches.

Worth knowing: the blog isn't in your shop's header until you add it. Use Navigation below and pick Blog.

Pages

Under Online store, Pages you make pages like About us, FAQ, Contact and Delivery. Press Add page, type a title and write the content. The web address is made from the title, so About us becomes /pages/about-us. You can change it. If you change it later, the old address sends visitors to the new one, so links on Google and in your emails keep working.

Tick Published to show a page to shoppers. A page that is not published is hidden, but you can still preview it while you are signed in. Tick Show in footer to list the page in your shop's footer. To put a page in your header or footer menu yourself, pick it under Navigation.

New to this? Press Add starter pages to get About us, FAQ, Contact and Delivery with simple wording. They start as drafts. Read each one, change what is not true for your business, then publish it. Your terms of sale, returns and privacy pages already exist under Policies, so the starter pages link to them instead of repeating them.

For an FAQ page, make each question a heading (Heading 3) and put the answer in the paragraph under it. Google can then show your questions and answers under your shop in search results. You need at least two questions for this to work.

Published pages are in your shop's sitemap. If you have a custom-built theme with its own page of the same address, the theme's page shows instead of the one you wrote here.

Under Online store, Navigation you see your menus: the Main menu (the header) and the Footer menu. Open one to see its links as a short list, each row showing the name and where it goes.

Press Add menu item, type a name and pick where it goes: Home, All products, Blog, a collection, a product, a policy or other page, or a blog post. The picker is a search box, so start typing. To link somewhere else, paste a full web address, or a path on your shop like /pages/about. Use Edit on a row to change it and Delete to drop it. Drag a row by its handle to reorder, or use the arrow buttons on the row if you would rather use the keyboard. Nothing changes on your shop until you press Save menu.

In the main menu, drag a row to the right (or use the right arrow button) to put it in a dropdown under the item above, and drag it back left to take it out. That is one level only. The footer has no dropdowns.

Until you save a menu, your shop shows its standard links, and the editor starts from those. Go back to the standard links undoes your changes. If a product or collection you linked to is deleted or hidden, its row quietly drops out of the menu.

Worth knowing: a custom-built theme decides whether it draws these menus. If your header doesn't change, ask us.

URL redirects

Moved from another shop? Under Online store, URL redirects, send an old address to a page on this shop so links on Google and in print keep working. Type Redirect from (for example /old-page) and Redirect to (a path on this shop, like /collections/all), or upload the redirect file you exported from Shopify. A table lists your redirects with how many visits each has had.

Both sides are paths on your shop, not full web addresses. Capital letters and a trailing slash on the old address are ignored.

Worth knowing: a redirect only applies when the old address would otherwise show a "not found" page. It does not replace a page that exists.

Buy it now button

Product pages show a Buy it now button beside Add to cart. It skips the cart and goes straight to checkout with just that item, and the shopper's own cart is left alone. Switch it off under Settings, Online store by unticking Show a "Buy it now" button on product pages.

Worth knowing: a product with sizes or colours needs one picked first, and a sold-out item can't be bought this way.

Locking your shop with a password

Not ready to open? Under Settings, Online store, tick Lock the shop with a password and choose a password (at least 4 characters). Visitors see a page with your shop name, your optional message, a box to enter the password, and a box to leave their email so you can tell them when you open. Those emails go to your Subscribers list (under Email marketing). You always see the shop when you are logged in as the owner.

Search engines are told to stay away while it is locked. Payments that were already started still go through. A visitor who enters the password stays in for 30 days.

Worth knowing: changing the password locks everyone out again, so they need the new one. The people who left their email only asked to hear when you open, so send them that message.

Homepage and collections

Products can be grouped into collections, with their own pages and web addresses, so customers can browse by category and you can link straight to one from social media or ads.

Search and filters

Shoppers can search your shop and narrow any shelf by price, in stock, size, colour and the other options your products have, product type and tag. Results are ordered by best match: an exact product name first, then names that start with what they typed, then matches in the SKU, barcode, tags, type and description. Accents and capital letters don't matter, and part of a word is enough ("cand" finds "Candles"). A filter only appears when it has more than one choice to offer. If nothing matches, shoppers see your newest products. Filtered and search pages are kept out of Google, which avoids thousands of near-duplicate pages. Filters are on for the default theme. A custom theme that draws its own product grid keeps doing its own filtering.

Still stuck? [email protected] or WhatsApp 073 429 5517.