Transcription of Live Q&A - Ask a Shopify Expert. In this Live Q&A webinar, I answer questions that were sent in about Shopify Web Development.
Introduction
Hey folks, just give me one second here. Looks like I forgot about this little delay here. So kind of checking here to make sure this is catching up. Going to give one or two minutes here just to make sure we have folks trickling in here. Lindsay, if you'd let me know, make sure I don't have my nice mic here set up. Because I'm doing co-working setup today. So just let me know in the chat, if we're doing okay on audio or if I need to tweak that at all. So here we are today. No real set agenda so far, other than I am going to kick off some general questions. I had some folks go ahead and submit some ideas as far as asking some questions about technical SEO, things of that nature. And so I get a lot of questions about that and I think some of those things can be kind of confusing.
So I thought it would be a good opportunity to try to go ahead and answer some of those things. So I am in a co-working space today, my family and I just recently moved here to Ashland, Ohio from Springfield, Missouri area. So we moved to be closer to family and so pretty, pretty happy about that. Okay. Got thumbs up from Lindsay that she can see and hear. That's how significant that delay is folks from that. So that's kind of funny, but so basically we moved here last week and I was hoping that all of our stuff would kind of come at the same time, but we did one of those pod shipping containers, load all the stuff up, sent it off and you know, it's, it got delayed. So it only just got delivered this morning with some of our other things.
I am currently at a co-working space in Ashland, even though it's a little town, they have this really nice co-working space called Coffee Space. And they set me up in this nice room here to work out of for the stream. So we're really grateful for that they let me kind of reserve a room here kind of late. I wasn't prepared for our stuff to get pushed back that far. And so I'm really glad that there was an option here, otherwise I'd be just doing it from the kitchen table or something like that. So yeah. So the way that this is going to work, at least as a reminder, housekeeping kind of type stuff, there is a little bit of a delay, like 30 seconds here between when I'm talking and something that's happening live. So if I don't get to a question or I don't acknowledge something like that, don't feel like I missed it or anything like that.
It's just might be that I haven't to quite caught up to it yet on the stream kind of type thing. And so Lindsay is in the chat. Lindsay is my sister, but she's also my executive assistant. So she helps out with scheduling, communications, and everything. What's up Blanklob? And she's going to be there too, making sure if y'all do have questions that I don't miss anything. So the idea here though, I did have quite a few folks kind of reach out about some questions that were more like, I would say developer specific, but the idea here hopefully is to be able to get some merchant questions in. So I'll answer some developer questions as well if I can, time allows and stuff, if we have that opportunity, but I definitely don't want that to be too rough, maybe on some of those, those merchants with not with it being more technical and stuff.
So hopefully going to provide some value today. But if folks do have other specific questions, I'm going to get to them as I can, but just let me know here in the chat and then also Lindsay, if you could drop that link to, if you want to submit your question anonymously trpage.info/webinarquestions, I believe it is. So if you could put that in the chat, Lindsay, that would be awesome. That way folks can click on that if they don't want to leave that in the chat and maybe they possibly just want to hit that up on an anonymous question or something like that, doesn't collect your email address or anything. It's just some way to submit form.
And then Lindsay will kind of make sure that I have the opportunity to kind of take a look at that. Cool. Well, so like I said, what I'm going to do at least initially here is I'm going to talk a little bit about just some questions that I get from folks on the regular and then leave that in for enough time for some folk to kind of funnel in and stuff like that. There are still just kind of a couple of minutes at the top of the hour here. And so hopefully that will be helpful here, but I'm going to do a quick screen share here.
Oh no. Okay. Sorry about that. So this is the fun part of doing these things live here and having a remote setup. Hopefully this sounds okay. Lindsay, let me know if not, thank you for pinging me there, but yeah, so I usually have a nice like Rode mic that I really like using. It's really portable and stuff like that. But since I had to walk a little ways from parking lots to get the stuff, I'm already transporting some other things, I just opted to go with my webcam mic, which hopefully that worked out okay. But if not, definitely let me know. And at least here, it's back in with that there. So. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Okay. So real quick. And I do see some questions in the chat. So I'm going to hit that here after these things.
Frequently Asked Questions for Google Search Console
I want to show y'all a little bit about this and then we'll kind of go into some of those details there as well. So here, this is just Google search console. I've hidden some information because I don't want to share obviously any information, no one wants that, for their good, the bad, the ugly to be shown off here. Oh thanks. Glad the web cam's coming in good. I do want to make sure that yeah, I want, I want to show off some of this stuff. So kind of like featuring highlighting these things. If you're talking about technical SEO, making sure that things are indexing properly on your Shopify store, this is a really, really bare minimum requirement to kind of get this going. The reason that I really like this obviously is because in addition to finding out information about what is, and isn't indexing, simple things like coverage site maps, really super simple with Shopify that gets submitted and handled for you.
You don't have to go in and do anything manually. Once you get all this stuff set up, it works really well. Shopify handles that for you updates that stuff, but it does include information that's really important. So things when we start talking about like speed score and those sorts of things, really, if you've followed any of my content for any length of time, you know it's really has to deal with core web vitals more so than a page speed score because it's much more comprehensive. So I'm going to touch on this here in a little bit, but I did want to show you all a couple of things here, mainly because there's a big difference between warnings and errors in Google search console. So a lot of folks think that they have to have all of these things cleared out in order for everything to be indexing properly.
That's not necessarily the case. So it's appropriate to understand that distinction and context. Okay. So here, anything with indexing, obviously when we have issues, you'll notice on this left hand side, obviously any of those areas we want to resolve now, the warnings on here might not actually be a problem, but they are often indicative of something where, Hey, there's some kind of a conflict here. It's not going to cause an issue necessarily with the indexing portion. However, there are some signals here that we might need to clear up. So a good example of that here, and we've got both the errors and the warnings showing up here. So errors are in red warnings are in yellow. So if we want to simplify this just a little bit here. So the issues here that are red, these are ones where, so these aren't indexed.
So the URLs associated with this, I'm not going to click any of these again, because I'm not trying to showcase any kind of client information here, but these are ones you absolutely have to resolve. If it's a red error, yes, you need to fix these. Some of these, if they're related to a 404, something along those lines, the best way for you to manage this is in your admin, on your Shopify admin, under navigation, you can actually set up some URL redirects. And if you don't know how to do that, obviously don't go in there messing around with too much stuff. But afterwards I'll include some links there as well, because there are some good resources on Shopify about how to set those up. It's really simple once you've done a couple of times, but basically, anytime you have a 404 like this, you're going to want to deal with that.
Now a 500 error, usually here, this is five XX. So usually that's an issue with access. So a permissions thing or something like that. That's probably some kind of like unique, random, specific error. So check into that. It might be as simple as clicking yes, validate this is fixed kind of type thing, because that's again, the really nice thing about this being set up in Google search console. Once you get into these specific issues, it gives you the option to resolve that and then click validate fix. So rather than waiting for Google to kind of come in, pull all that page again, basically. And that's a term, that crawling term is from, you'll learn more about that in this in-depth guide to how it works, but basically, rather than waiting for Google to come back and check on that again, you can prompt it, basically put it in the queue to kind of like be prioritized.
So Google still kind of gets to decide when that does or does not happen. So don't be too frustrated about that. Sometimes it takes a while, but at least we have some tools there. So I want to then go back to the distinction here with these warnings. So in this instance, we're looking at indexing and coverage and then these are warnings. So this could potentially be an issue because there are some pages that have been indexed, but they've been blocked by robots.txt. Now for folks that don't deal with this stuff all that much, this probably doesn't mean too much to you, but for the most part, if you have something that's been blocked by this robots.txt File, then basically that means you probably don't want that to be indexed. And so the resolution for that is actually to have it removed from the site map.
And then go ahead and click validate fix from there. Now, if you are not a developer, you can probably talk to a developer. The easiest way to do this is usually setting up this SEO hidden meta field that Shopify has just kind of like built into it. There's some documentation on that as well. I probably need to conclude a link for that. And just to reiterate, too, this whole thing, in addition to being recorded, what I do is I get this transcribed and then thrown up on my website afterwards. So I'll try to make sure to include some resource links for these as well. Just so that way that's easier for you all to find after the fact. And it'll be in the description too for the YouTube link as well. But so in an instance where something is indexed, but blocked here, that's probably an issue that you want to resolve.
So moving over here, okay. I'm just scan the page real quick. I didn't accidentally leak any client info here. Everything should be covered up for y'all. But so this gives you an idea on this. In this specific instance, these folks went with an agency to do a pretty massive redesign. So that's why you can see this big, big drop off. So this is why I talk about the importance too, of making sure we do some kind of a technical SEO overview before and after some kind of a major change. You'll notice here that we had a pretty significant drop in good URLs after this big redesign that they did. And so that's something just to be aware of, obviously in instances like we want that to be fixed because if we see a significant drop off possibly an organic search and those sorts of things, we probably want to track that.
And so we might need to backtrack some of these other things that might have been released as features to kind of help out customers. But instead we might have hurt some of our other metrics here. So you can see kind of scrolling down here. There's some issues with, where we've got some failing URLs in this specific instance, this typically has to deal with the largest content for paint. There were some changes that were made to the site that basically didn't necessarily acknowledge performance as part of that, was more of a design change. And so again, there's good and bad there. So you have to kind of weigh out the pros and cons when that does come into effect, keep an eye on your metrics and things of that nature, conversion rates and things, in order to decide if that was actually truly worth it. Or if there are some things that need to be done in order to kind of preserve what we had as previously maybe some good page experience scores there.
Okay. Moving on here, kind of the same thing. This is to deal with the core web vitals. So again, this had to deal with these metrics here, where it's talking more specifically about where we've got some underperforming URLs. So if you do go into the report, this is really helpful in helping you target, identify specific instances. The nice thing with Shopify is a lot of these are going to be based on templates. So you might have 113 poor URLs, 47 that need improvement. But by changing two or three templates, that's going to resolve all of these 150 plus errors, right? So something to kind of keep in mind, not to like freak out when you see something like this, it's just something to consider or think about in your strategy. Something you might have to talk to your developer about or talk to a developer about possibly. But again, if you go back and watch the speed optimization webinar I did as well, you can kind of learn how you could potentially fix some of those things yourself as well.
Okay. So this is one I get a lot of questions about. So we talked about indexing and experience here. These are really important. So when you have issues related to these items, I'd really encourage you that those need to be resolved. Now you'll notice here, kind of if you scroll down, these are noted as enhancements specifically what these are, these have to deal primarily with rich snippet results. So it's called an enhancement because it's not actually going to impact whether or not your page or whatever is going to be indexed properly. It has to deal more with a presentation in search. So sometimes when you go to search for a product or something like that, and you see there's actual star ratings on there, but then other products from other companies, maybe there aren't any star ratings at all, that's called a rich snippet result.
And so that's part of these enhancements here where you can see even the brick problems. So that's when you're looking at a website and it kind of shows you the URL path. So that's a UX or user experience benefit, but it also is something that is really helpful for folks too, when you're looking at search. That's something that Google likes to see just because it makes your site easier to navigate. So some of these other items, but I'd really focus on products and review snippets, particularly in these instances when you're seeing these show up in search results, because what will happen is basically if you're able to serve something like reviews on your site or pricing right there in search results, your product is much more likely to be clicked on, just in general, because this is specific information. The user is wanting, right?
Rather than them having to click in and find out whether or not it fits their pricing or something like that. If they can see that all from the search page, that's supposed to enhance your listing, essentially, right? So it's not necessarily a problem. So when we do see these errors and things of that nature, it's not something to be super worried about aside from just being knowledgeable about this is an area to improve. Okay, I'm going to move over here because a good example of this as well is going to be under enhancements on products. So you can see here, I'm going to click on this. We don't have any errors, so we'd want to do that. So in this instance with the enhancements, if it's an error, Google's just not going to serve any rich results at all. They're just going to be like, no, we're good.
You have stuff you need to fix. So we're not going to even mess with it. Now, if you have warnings in the enhancement category, that is not something that will stop rich snippet results from being served, what this warning in the enhancements category, and this is where it's kind of confusing, so I do get this, is that basically it's going to come up as an issue or a warning, yellow, not red and say, Hey, you could be leveraging this specific item, this specific piece of information for your customers and you're not doing that. So again, in this instance, a really common one that we'll see would be this review or missing field for aggregate rating. The reason for that being in some instances, your product might not even have a review yet. And so you might have 300 SKUs and maybe a hundred of them haven't yet been reviewed.
That's okay. It's not going to hurt you necessarily. A lot of these apps that are serving this information, if it's not being served directly with the theme, which, and for the most part, you are going to want that survey in an app. But basically for the most part, that is not something that you're going to have to worry about because the preference would be, instead of showing zero out of five stars or no reviews, right? You'd just not want to see that at all because a product with zero reviews probably isn't going to perform well as just one that just doesn't serve that information at all. So that's why a typical pattern is to just simply not display that at all if there are no reviews to show, if there's one or two, then it starts to populate for that item and good to go there.
So that's something to kind of consider there. So those were a couple of items, at least here for this. Again, we'll make sure that you've got this information here and I'll include some other information for, I mentioned some other links about meta fields and stuff like that. So we'll make sure that's got placed in.
"...Favorite Shopify theme and what would you love to see in a Shopify Theme regarding the dev experience?"
So, all right, so let's look at some of these questions here. I do have some other kind of backup questions, but I want to hit some of these questions on the webinar. I want to reward the people that showed up for the webinar portion here, right? So let's get some of these questions answered. Favorite Shopify theme, what I'd love to see in a Shopify theme regarding dev experience. And thanks for organizing this. Yeah, for sure. Awesome. So my favorite Shopify theme, for me personally, it's kind of hard.
I tend to have a preference for archetype themes just because I love how they put together documentation so well. They even have documentation for developers for JavaScript events, which is really, really handy rather than having to, as a freelance developer, roll my own in some instance, or track down why there's some event happening elsewhere and it's conflicting with an app or something like that. Just having that directly in documentation is really, really nice. I actually found out that I was saying archetype. I was saying it archetype for a long time. And that's obviously not the right way to say that. I was recently working out at streamlined. So, but impulse is a very popular one that I've used with a lot of stores. I think it's a really good deal here, but again from the developer standpoint, sorry to move around on here a little bit, from the developer standpoint and even the user standpoint, just having their documentation site is great.
They also have a YouTube channel as well. I believe where they kind of cover some basic stuff and they just do a really good job. I'm a real big fan about how they put all of that together. So in addition to that, asking about that and wanting to see different features and things like that. Yeah. But as far as the dev experience, that's really the biggest thing. I just want some documentation, and it's really great too, at least if you've got some support that's pretty good as well. Support is a pretty big key aspect of that. And I know for a lot of folks, especially with this theme accelerator program going on, so the theme accelerator program is kind of maybe happening behind the scenes for merchants that aren't really aware of that. Shopify kind of put this big deal together where they're really pushing to get more themes on the theme store.
So they're really encouraging all these new devs and old devs to kind of come in and get some more themes on the theme store. I'm really excited to see that. There's been some really good content coming out of that, which Blanklob, and I'm not sure if I'm saying your handle there right, but I know you've had some really, really good content as well. So I'm appreciative of that always too, to kind of see from other devs and stuff moving into this space. So I'm looking forward to seeing what you're, what you're building there, but yeah, so hopefully that helped answer some of that. And that was kind of really, I had another question kind of about what theme is the best theme as well. So, and typically what I recommend is that kind of comes down to the merchant, what your goals are, how you want to deal with that.
The biggest thing, and not to knock on like some of these other folks, because I think they are really talented, that put together some of these themes that aren't on the Shopify theme store, which has really only recently opened up again. It is just that quality control that's really built into different Shopify themes naturally. So there's a Q&A process, accessibility standard, performance standards. So I always recommend folks, if you're going to do a Shopify theme, I would go ahead and make sure it is on the theme store. That's just really my best recommendation. So if you do have a budget, I'd look at some of these paid themes. So the Shopify free themes are great, but the paid themes, the thing that I really like about them is you're going to get a better level of support than you would with going with a free theme from Shopify.
You're probably also going to just naturally get some more features. You're going to get some more consistent updates, though Shopify has been killing it with the updates on the free themes here lately, but so have theme developers. In my opinion, some of these, especially the more mature ones like archetype themes, they've been coming up with updates on the regular here, making sure that folks are supported there. So I think that's a really good thing. As far as best, I usually try to tell folks who kind of approach it more so from the design, functionality, design and functionality standpoint. So particularly if you're working with a developer, you want a bunch of custom stuff, try to find something, or a theme, that matches close to your style, but then has a bunch of the other features built in already because if you're going to have a lot of that stuff built in custom, paying a couple hundred dollars for a theme is more often than not going to be cheaper than having some individual dev like myself just build in a bunch of custom sections for you.
So I think that's something where you'll get more bang for your buck basically buying one of these more premium themes. Now, something that doesn't get talked about a lot, but I think is really helpful for folks is just to make sure, you can have 20 unpublished themes, unless you're on Shopify Plus, then there's not a number that I'm aware of, but you can have 20 unpublished themes in your Shopify admin. And so Prestige is another popular one here, but Maestro, they're great as well, but this little try theme button, you can go in and just do a demo on your store. And it's not really a time limit. I have some that over a year old that I started at some point, just never removed, and you don't pay anything. You can go in there, you can make settings changes and everything else, you don't pay anything until you're ready to either publish or you need a developer to come in and do something custom and need access to code.
So, again, really nice thing here. This is a lifetime purchase, so a lot of folks, a lot of these themes used to be like $180, but then the cost increased as functionality and design and development time increased here as well. After all that change to online store 2.0 that occurred last year. And so, Prestige might have been $180 and now it's $300 or something like that. But the folks who had previously purchased Maestro or Prestige here for $180 got this update, this 2.0 update with all the new stuff, that's now $300. They got that for free. So that's just something to kind of bear in mind when you're thinking about how best to spend your money, best value, best return on your funds. That's definitely something you want to do. Make sure you try it out.
Try out the settings. I worked with one merchant here relatively recently, where I made a recommendation for a handful of themes. They narrowed it down to two. And from my suggestion, then which was just to kind of get in it, use the try theme option, and we're doing a bunch of customizations, but do the try theme option. See which one of them is just easier for you to navigate in the settings and customizer and those sorts of things. They ended up picking the one that I wasn't necessarily hoping for, but that's the one that worked out the best for them. And so that's the one we ended up going. So as a freelance developer myself, I don't ever want to tell people, go with this theme always. There's a couple of shops that do that and it's great because they can pop out really high quality themes with only just looking at these specific, narrow set of themes.
And I don't want to bash on any other third party sites either too, but I've had a couple of poor experiences from themes that are very premium themes off the Shopify Theme store, particularly when it comes to accessibility. So that's something that I am kind of leery of dealing with anymore. I really want to make sure that there's a lot of good QA checks involved there. And so that's just where I think your time is best spent and your money is best spent, all those sorts of things, testing these things out for yourself, trying it, seeing if it works and makes sense for you. And then you can kind of go from there. So, okay. Hopefully that's that's enough on themes, right? And not too much for y'all. Let me take a look here.
All right. So a couple of questions, and these are kind of developer specific questions. So hopefully I'll get maybe some other questions as well that aren't developer specific, because I said, I don't want to get too heavy and too technical. So I'm going to stay pretty general with some of these developer based ones, just because I want to be helpful kind of in that vein. But one question was asking about customizations, customized apps with JavaScript. So something like accordion tabs to product variant apps or something along those lines. So a couple of ways to approach that and really, it might have just been the example. Accordion tabs or something like that, I wouldn't recommend an app. Talk to a developer. That's a pretty easy lift to incorporate a lot of themes might have them.
That's another thing that folks kind of forget about, once you're in here, make sure that you are checking out the documentation. So that's going to be directly within your theme. You might actually have some of the features that you want built into your theme either by developer or something else. And you might want to reach out to an app or something like that to get that, but you might actually have it within your settings already. You just haven't used it. Maybe it's been a while and you just forgot that it was something that was there. So make sure to check the documentation. That would be the very first and foremost step to make sure you do that. Now from a developer standpoint, I want to do some sort of a customization using JavaScript to kind of interact with some other app or something like that.
The first thing that I typically do, if it's not super simple to kind of figure out from just kind of diving in, taking a look at how the app is interacting with the theme, is reach out to the developer. And this is something that I would recommend folks do as well. If you're having a problem with a theme is reaching out to the theme provider. All theme providers have to provide support as well for their themes. And so now, they can't help with customizations. So you should kind of bear that in mind as well, but you know, they can help out with anything that's already built into the theme. They've got to provide some support there. And so a lot of these folks are really great at what they do and they're really motivated to help Shopify merchants. So I would really recommend that you do that.
I worked with a lot of folks. It's kind of few and far between when I work with an app or a theme provider and they're just not great to work with. A lot of them are super motivated to help out. So sometimes when we reach out, and just say, Hey, we're having this issue. This is what we want to do. They can at least point us in the right direction. Except I like that in archetype. How like, Hey, here are the JavaScript events. So me rather than having to roll my own, I can just tie into existing. That makes my job way easier. I'm not billing more time having to figure out how to do that for the client as well. The merchant in this instance, if I can just reach out and do that directly. So I'd recommend whether you're a developer or a merchant leverage that access to support, and be okay if they can't really help you, if it's something super custom, but they might be able to point you in the right direction.
So that would be my general suggestion here without going too much into the technical aspect of things, and weighing that option here. Like I said, that example for instance, had to deal with... That option had to deal more with a developer asking like how to do this, from that perspective. But I would say as a general rule, like we would want to like both merchants and developers make sure that you're reaching out for support, being patient with folks there. And like I said, a lot of these folks, the Shopify community is great. They're really just interested in helping out. So I've, I've always been very, very impressed.
Upgrading Liquid Coding Skills
Okay. All right. So another question that I had come in through the form was just about upgrading Liquid coding skills, excuse me. So whether or not prefer free resources on the internet, or if there are any paid courses to help with Liquid coding. So this is kind of like a big question. Again, this is kind of developer specific. I think it's good for merchants as well to kind of understand some HTML or some Liquid. Don't feel like you have to, but I think that's kind of like a superpower for you if you can do that.
I'm trying to... A great book reference on here, and this is written by Ivan and let me see if I can't pull this up for y'all real quick. Excuse me. So Ivan is a developer who's worked for a couple of big shops in the Shopify space and he wrote a book along Shopify theme, customization with Liquid. It's a fantastic book.
Excuse me.
So it's really fantastic. And it's well worth the money just to have, I love just having, I really like books. And so I love just having it as a reference to look up things. I think if you've been in Shopify and coding Liquid for a while, you won't learn a ton, but you will learn a couple of things. There were a couple of things that I was like, oh, that's like a really niche use case, but I can see how that would be really helpful. So there's a lot of good little nuggets in there as well. It's well written, good examples and those sorts of things. So I'd look at that.
Another one that you could consider if you want to learn a little bit in addition to... So obviously there's Shopify docs, but if you want just free resources here, Chris, the freelancer Chris codes on Shopify, he has a really good write up. And then of course, if you want some really good info, definitely make sure to check out Jan here. Jan is amazing. And he has some really great information, I think. Does this link out to his YouTube? Oh, sorry. I don't think this one does.
This is what happens when you do something live, right?
Anyways, let me see if I can't pull that up. I'll include that in the link, or in the description afterwards, but Jan is awesome when it comes to all things Shopify. So I would definitely check him out both as far as whether or not paid courses, paid resources and stuff like that, Liquid coding and understanding those sorts of things. He also has Freemote, which is a great developer program. And I think I've got a couple of questions from folks about whether or not to just go with learning things for free or doing paid development. So personally what I did was I kind of learned on the side over the course of several years and then did my own Shopify store for a short period of time, or tried. And that didn't work out super great, because I'm not a marketer and that's something you need to be able to do in order to be successful, right, in the direct to consumer world and those sorts things.
So I really enjoyed doing the coding aspect of things and then found just a really good opportunity to be valuable there. Well, thank you Lindsay for dropping that link in the chat there. So that's something that I would really recommend as far as cutting your time down would be, doing some kind of a paid course. There's also all sorts of things here, but you know, whether it's, oh, what is that called, skills, skill builders, Skillshare. I think Skillshare has some, some Liquid courses and those sorts of things. But if you have a lot of time and you don't have a lot of funds, there's definitely ways for you to do that. The Shopify dev docs are fantastic.
And so there's a lot of different opportunities here for you to get kind of involved here. So themes specifically, really, really good documentation. I'd really consider that to be the starting point for a lot of these things, kind of building, get yourself set up on a Shopify partner account, do some development themes, test that out, see how that's working for you. And I think you'll be really surprised to find how far you can get, if you've got any kind of web development experience in general. And then as far as merchants, this stuff is just really good to know, just in general, access to these docs and those sorts of things or paying somebody that does know. So maybe you've got a developer, and you do want them to kind of level up some things, just make sure they've got access to good resources. That's always a positive thing there. I think so.
So yeah, in general, if you've got time and you don't have a lot of funds you can get very far, but I think the way to do it, if I had to do it all over again, I would definitely take something like Jan's Freemote code course, just because it would've shortened my timeline as far as moving to freelancing full time. It would've been amazing to get my foot in the door there sooner and make that jump. But it worked out how it did for a reason. But I think, as far as when I recommend that to folks, if you can do it and you don't want to do it over a long period of time, because this stuff does take time to learn. You shouldn't just feel like you can ingest it overnight. And that's the same thing for merchants, just even learning the Shopify lingo.
I work with a lot of folks who are just starting out there just really confused with the term collections and, that's fair. That's realistically, that's Shopify jargon speak. And so helping folks kind of like learn and understand some of those basics when it comes to Shopify, I think is a really, really good thing, and a worthwhile thing for all developers, freelancers, marketers, folks that are involved in Shopify to be able to do. But just understand that if you don't have the ability to do that, you can learn a lot of it online. It's just going to take you more time and not to beat yourself up over that, because I think that's really easy to do.
Best Apps to use for XYZ
Okay. All right. So one kind of came in from the former, one that I get a lot kind of type thing is just asking about best apps to use for X, Y, and Z. So, there's just so many different apps out there for a lot of different things and there's going to continue to be more apps out there. Shopify has done a lot to promote a really good community around that really trying to build up that ecosystem. So that way I know a lot of folks get frustrated, like there's an app for everything kind of type thing. Well, if you're coming from something like WordPress e-commerce, dealing with plugins and those sorts of things like that is a nightmare. Having to just have a developer around just to update plugins once a month is not something you have to do on Shopify.
And you're still paying for a lot of those plugins, or you're rolling the dice because you're using some free plugins. What a lot of folks don't really understand about a lot of that free software can be that those are one of the reasons why there's a lot of issues with WordPress sites getting hacked in all these sorts of things, right?
It's because a lot of those are just very susceptible to that. And so I think it's just something that's worthwhile noting, you're going to pay for something that's a little bit more robust. It's going to be more secure. It's not going to have as much time for you to invest. I'm just babysitting your website basically because it's very easy to throw up a Shopify website and just call it good. So I think these are things where you kind of have to figure out where are the best places to spend your money, spend your time, and seeing that return on that and then trying to decide if it's worth it for you or not. I think more times than not, it is worth it. It just might take you a little bit there to get some traction.
Closing Thoughts
So, okay. I'm just checking to see if I had any additional questions, anything like that.
And I'm not really seeing any questions in chat. Ran through a couple of questions that I had that I either get a lot or that I had submitted through the form or that I get on the regular here as well, tried to link up some different resources and those sorts of things. So from technical SEO and then trying to go through that route. So yeah, I don't know if folks like this format, but just doing an open Q&A, I think it's of helpful sometimes when it is just more specific. And so I appreciate folks being understanding at least of me not having time to really prepare for stuff all in the middle of a big move from one state to the next here, closer to the family.
And yeah. So I'm going to give a couple of minutes here if anybody else has any other questions as well that I can help answer or anything like that, I'd be happy to do that, but yeah, otherwise then we'll probably just cut this maybe a little bit short, which is all right. Also experimenting a little bit, and folks can do that as well. I'm going to throw up a link afterwards or Lindsay, if you want to drop that in chat as well for the post webinar survey, just asking folks too about when's a good time to do this or content that they want to see on here as well. And then, like I said, make sure to link up some additional resources here after the fact as well. Just so that way I can make sure that folks do have access to those after the stream is over as well. I think that will be also helpful.
So, cool. All right then, folks. Well, I appreciate your time and hope you have a great rest of your day. I'm going to get back into trying to dive in on some issues with a conflict in a theme and an app where it comes to some weird JavaScript event stuff going on, try to help the merchants, that way they can get some subscription stuff back up and running. So, all right, have a great week.
Link resources:
How Google Search WorksArchetype Themes
Shopify Theme Store
Liquid Coding Book
Chris the Freelancer Liquid Coding Guide
Jan's YouTube Channel
Shopify Theme docs