Getting Started
A Big Cartel theme consists of 9 built-in pages and is made up of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and a combination of filters and variables. All changes to a store’s theme will need to be made in the Customize Design section of the admin, but if you’re a more advanced coder we’d love for you to check out Dugway to develop and test your theme locally.
Not a coder? If you’re looking for themes to install in your store, or general theme customization tips, check out our customization article »
| Page |
Description |
Layout |
The main store template. |
Cart |
Where customers can see the contents of their cart and proceed to the checkout. |
Contact |
A built in contact page. |
Home |
The store’s Home page. |
Maintenance |
The page visitors will see when a store is in Maintenance Mode. |
Product |
The individual product page. |
Products |
The page where visitors can see all products and categories. |
The Layout page is the most important of all of these, and you can think of it as a master template that all store pages live inside. Any content that you need displayed throughout the entire store — a header, navigation, logo, etc will go in here. We also require that you include some important variables to make sure your store functions properly: {{ head_content }}, which goes inbetween the <head> HTML tags, and {{ page_content }} inside <body>. Here’s what that looks like inside a simple, stripped down HTML template:
{{ head_content }} loads important system code from our server, while {{ page_content }} will display the content for the current page being viewed - such as product details on the individual Product page.
You’ll also notice there’s a line in the above code to load a CSS file. We’ll take care of hosting your theme’s CSS, which can be edited in Customize Design > Advanced > CSS. You’ll then want to make sure you call this in the <head> HTML tags like the example above.
We don’t offer hosting for any separate javascript files though, so if your theme requires any javascript you’ll need to have load it from an external website or include it directly inside your page content.