When you pick a theme, it’s important that you fully understand what makes it developer-friendly. Many merchants end up needing the help of a developer to customize their theme to meet their specific business needs.
In this post, Tim Masek, the Director of Growth at Storetasker, shares expert Shopify theme developer Jakub Sztyber’s first-hand insights on why he prefers working with an Out of the Sandbox theme — particularly Flex.
What makes Out of the Sandbox themes better than other premium Shopify themes?
When I asked Jakub what makes Out of the Sandbox themes special, he told me that they’re “The Gold Standard” of themes.
“Of all the themes I’ve tried —and I’ve played around with many many Shopify themes available on the marketplace — none of them have such a developer-friendly codebase.”
Having a friendly codebase means the theme’s code is well-structured, familiar (no new syntax) and consistent. This means that when a developer takes a look at your Out of the Sandbox theme’s code, they’ll know exactly how to achieve the customization you’re looking for.
What’s the best Out of the Sandbox theme?
While all Out of the Sandbox themes have a developer-friendly codebase, Jakub’s favorite theme is Flex. Here’s why.
Flex is flexible
“As the name entails, Flex is extremely flexible but also scalable. With Flex I can build anything from a single product store to a large marketplace.”
The key difference between Flex and other Out of the Sandbox themes is its lack of limitations. For example, while Superstore is built perfectly for wholesale shops, Flex is designed to work well for a wide variety of business types.
“The Flex theme blends all of the functionality from all of their other themes so you don’t have any limitations whatsoever — you can leverage it as is, or if the merchant wants to customize it in different places, that’s also super easy to do.”
Flex has built-in merchant-friendly functionality
There’s also a lot of backend functionality built into the Flex theme that enables the merchant to control their website without having to hire a dev. Many other themes don’t have that functionality coded in and it can take developers like Jakub up to 30 extra hours to add it.
Jakub gave a good example:
“Lots of merchants want to control their hero section. They want the flexibility to change the image, but also the copy. But not just the assets, they also want to easily modify the dimensions of those assets. In many themes that functionality can only be achieved in the code, but with Flex, the merchant can control all of that themselves without hiring a dev.”
So there you have it, a first-hand perspective from one of our devs on why Flex is a great theme choice for Shopify developers. Thanks to Jakub for sharing his wisdom — if you’d like to work with him or another expert Shopify developer to customize your theme, reach out!
-Tim from Storetasker
