Refactoring a theme without a redesign budget
A theme refactor is the project nobody will fund, because it produces no screenshot. Done in the right order it is also the one that makes every later change cheaper.
AUTHOR
Prakash Prabhakar
Director at Lucent Commerce. 22 posts, newest first.
22 posts by Prakash Prabhakar
Support load during peak, and the content that reduces it
Peak does not bring new questions, it brings the same five at ten times the volume. Every one of them can be answered in October, on the page where it gets asked.
Support volume as a product signal
Every ticket is a customer paying you in their own time to report a defect. Most stores treat that as a cost to reduce rather than the cheapest research they will ever get.
The Black Friday runbook
A readiness checklist is what you do in October. A runbook is what someone opens at 2am with a phone in one hand and no time to think.
The pre-peak code freeze, and what it should cover
A freeze that stops everything gets broken by the first urgent request and then means nothing. Freeze the things that cannot be undone from the admin, and leave the rest open.
Theme code review: what to look for
A review that produces forty comments produced nothing. Automate the nitpicks, then spend human attention on blast radius, Liquid cost and who owns the setting.
Theme migration without a redesign
Changing the architecture and keeping the design is a legitimate project, and a harder sell than a redesign. It is also the one that pays back.
What to do in the last week before Black Friday
Nothing you build in the last week will beat anything you rehearse in it. The work is proving the discounts, the rollback and the rota, and saying no to everything else.
Planning a Shopify roadmap you can actually deliver
Most ecommerce roadmaps are a list of things somebody wanted. This is how to build one that survives contact with a trading year.
Theme architecture: settings, blocks and the limits of each
Sections, blocks and settings each solve a different problem. Using the wrong one is how a theme becomes unmaintainable.
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