Fishing and Adventure Shopify Website Refresh

Fishing and Adventure had a dated Shopify theme and were in need of an upgrade. While their website was ‘operational,’ but it wasn’t firing on all cylinders and needed to move to a modern Shopify theme to enable them to operate their website as part of their marketing tool kit.

What wasn’t working:

• Couldn’t update it themselves easily due to its age.
• Weren’t able to take advantage of Shopify’s newer features
• Sponsor and content pages were clunky
• The existing theme did not meet accessibility standards

Our approach to Shopify websites isn’t what you might expect. When it comes to Shopify we’re not big fans of reinventing the wheel. Many agencies out there will build a client a new theme from scratch which for some bigger businesses might work. But for people who need something that looks great, works well and doesn’t break the bank we take a theme approach.

We break our Shopify website delivery down into two phases.

1. A strong foundation which includes our content, design and theme considerations

2. Bringing it all together on the Shopify platform which involves the final setup and go live.

We define the content and determine the structure; then, we define the brand styles and pick the theme.

Content

For the content - Fishing and Adventure already had website content that would work, although it needed a little tweaking, it was generally fit for purpose. The Fishing and Adventure website is a conversion point for their merch, but as far as their video content and sponsorship etc go - the website serves a more informational intent.

Brand Styles 

One of the most overlooked parts of theme configuration is brand alignment. We define the client's digital brand to ensure we’ve got clear, consistent on brand treatment for their logo, colours, typography, links and buttons.

A great example of texture - we used a paper tear to simulate the ocean floor

Structure

Knowing the content was generally in good shape we moved to the content. Our Designer looked at the website content and reorganized the layout. Using more modern content treatments, a cleaner layout and a more organised IA we were able to give the site new life.

Picking a theme

For this approach to Shopify websites to work, we need to find and select a theme that aligns with our client's brand. This can take a while, and there is some investigation required. We needed to determine:

• If the look and feel would align to what we need
• What website components the theme had
• How much we can customise Buttons, Typography, Image Styles and more to match the client's brand
• How usable and accessible things like the navigation are.

Once we found a theme that ticked the right boxes, we were able to configure the theme to the client's brand and content structure.

Configure

With everything selected it’s now time to build and bring everything together. We install the new theme on the same store as the existing one, and start bringing things to life. At this point, we match the theme to the brand styles, add the content to align with our planned structure making some small content tweaks where needed.

Bypass the complex stuff

By building on Fishing and Adventure's existing Shopify platform we were able to keep all existing integrations such as Xero, Shipping configurations and their entire product catalogue which meant the focus was on the layout and look and feel rather than the complex stuff that had already been set up.

Client Approval & Go Live

Once we’d done our part we delivered a training session to the client to show them how the flexible Shopify page editor worked, so they could go through and edit and add any new content prior to go live. We plugged a few FAQ, Sponsor, and Bio holes before we hit the green light.

With our approach going live is just a click of a button to switch the themes. With a quick check of the pages and a dry run of the cart, going live is an effortless experience

The finished product helps the team at Fishing and Adventure have more control over their website and gives them access to new Shopify features that help Shopify act as a more holistic marketing platform for them. With their upgraded store they not only have something that looks great but access to features like:

• Engagement Automations for buyers
• Marketing tools for EDMs and Ads
• An AI enabled content editing platform
• Drag and drop page builder
• Customisable product pages
• Access to theme updates

Fishing and Adventure started with a site that worked, and walked away with a tool they can use to grow their brand.