Recommendations for building public Site templates

Use the following recommendations when building a public Site template.

Build multiple templates for different business niches

One template can satisfy merchants from different verticals with little tweaks and adjustments. The functionality of templates allows you to incorporate completely different setups, layouts, sections, and design choices for creating multiple templates out of the built assets.

We recommend you to try combining default Ecwid sections with some of your custom-built ones and tailor your website template for merchants of different verticals. For example, if the app has 20 sections in the Crane project, you can make the following 3 templates:

• My Template — Bikes:
  The template-bike.ts uses 6 of your custom sections + 2 default sections. It has images and content that showcase a bike store.
• My Template — Cosmetics:
  The template-cosmetics.ts uses 10 of your custom sections + 1 default section. Its images and content reflect a cosmetics store.
• My Template — Apparel:
  The template-apparel.ts uses 15 of your custom sections. It can have images and content for showcasing shoes or a clothing store.

Depending on the installed template, the merchant will see different sections in the website Editor. However, regardless of which template is installed, all 20 custom sections that you built as part of the template will be available to the merchant in the Add section menu.

The order and content available in the sections also depend on the currently installed template. Installing a new template overrides all sections and their content. After that, the merchant can rearrange sections and change the content and design settings provided you defined them in the content.ts and design.ts files for each section.

Create bright preview stores for templates

Before publishing your templates app, you’ll need to create a preview store for each of your templates. These stores are available for merchants through the Preview Template button in the website Editor. Setting up exciting preview stores is a great opportunity to encourage clients to start with your design.

Combine it with the previous recommendation, and you get a handful of bright previews for your work, that can attract merchants with different needs and verticals.

Name your templates right

Following the focus on the business solutions rather than general design or colors, name your templates by their niche or use case and not by their color scheme or layout.

For example, My template - Light and My template - Dark template names are considered bad as they don't cover the merchant's need for an apparel store. Names specific to the verticals, for example, My template - Bikes and My template - Home decor, will attract more clients.

We recommend using the following format for all template names: Brand/dev name - Template vertical.

This way, merchants can clearly define your templates from others or even search them by your brand.