How do theme styles work?

To customize your store’s styles, you have two options: use our simple controls, or get down and dirty with your own CSS.

Before you get started

It’s probably a good idea to make any changes to your styles while in maintenance mode. This allows you to make a bunch of design changes behind the scenes, and your customers won’t see them until you’re finished.

Simple

Our simple controls give you an easy way of changing colors, fonts, and other common styles. With just a few clicks you can give your store a brand new look. Each theme offers different styling options, so play around with some different looks and see what you like best.

CSS

With CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) you can do anything from add a background image to completely change the look and layout of your store. There are a number of good CSS books and online resources to help you get started. However, if this sounds a bit too advanced for you, you may want to find a web designer to help you out.

Editing CSS offline

Planning a major CSS overhaul? We recommend using one of the many options out there for real-time styling of CSS. Tools like the Web Developer extension, TopStyle, Style Master, and CSSEdit, will allow you to extract the theme’s stylesheet, save it to your computer, then customize it while previewing the changes on your live store.

The process you use to modify the CSS will vary depending on your tool of choice, but once you have it to your liking:

1. Upload any new images that are used to your own server or file storage location.
2. Turn on maintenance mode in your store so your changes will be made behind-the-scenes.
3. Select all your new CSS and copy/paste it into the CSS field in your admin.
4. Save the changes and check them out on your live store.
5. Turn off maintenance mode.