How to Become a Shopify Theme Developer

what's up youtube chris here again from christthefreelancer.com and in this video let's talk about how to actually become a shopify theme developer first of all thanks for your patience over the last few months it's been a bit of a busy period with lots of client work and of course the release of my latest skillshare class linkedin freelancing which we'll talk about later in the video but for now i want to get straight into the topic and talk about how to become a shopify theme developer so obviously on this channel so far we've covered quite a bit on shopify theme development it's been my focus for the last year and a half after i started specializing in this area and you guys have maybe seen my video on the day in the life you're curious on how to actually get to the point where you can start freelancing or even work in a job as a shopify theme developer well there's two parts and of course you're going to need to the skills to perform the work but you're also going to need to know how to find work and actually get started getting your first projects so those are the two parts we're going to be talking about in today's video starting with skills do you have the skills of a front-end web developer because essentially a shopify theme developer is just a front-end web developer who works on the shopify platform so if you don't even know what the difference between front end and back end is definitely check out my course understanding web development a beginner's guide to the web on skillshare if you're starting at that point you really need to start with the basics of web development but i'm going to assume that you at least know the difference between front end and back end for this video and so front end as you should know is html css javascript pretty much everything that is run in your browser all right so you've got the back end which sends the html css and javascript to the front end and the front end is what gets put together in your browser and essentially that is all you have access to in shopify and it's delivered through the theme all right so yes you're going to need to know html and css and javascript depending on the complexity of the task within theme development you don't have to be you know a master of all the frameworks because it's best to keep it simple when you're working with shopify themes when it comes to javascript but you need to have some skills in front of web development so this is going to be much easier for you if you already work as a front-end web developer or have learnt those skills the second thing you need to learn to kind of bring those front-end web development skills over to skillshare is to learn about shopify liquid shopify liquid is the templating language of shopify themes it's essentially like a programming language but like really dumbed down and all it does is extract data from your store and present it in the theme so there's no there's nothing within shopify liquid for you to update a database or anything like that it doesn't provide you any back-end operations it just brings the data from the store and puts it together with html css and javascript to create the front-end experience shopify liquid doesn't take that long to master it's as i said very dumbed down language and if you want to know how to code in shopify liquid i've got a tutorial on this youtube channel it's basically the crash course that's going to get you started with shopify liquid and of course if you want to go deeper shopify theme programming on my skillshare channel is kind of the next step after that okay now the third thing you're going to need to know in terms of skills is kind of the platform itself so shopify how it actually works how there's different templates and what objects are available within which templates how snippets sections and layouts work with the templates all of that kind of theme structure that's stuff i cover in my skillshare class shopify theme development how to build and customize your own online store so again i've got resources here for all the kind of different things that you need to learn but to kind of give you a road map here you need to know front-end web development you need to know how to use shopify liquid which by the way is not overwhelming you know you can just look up the reference how do i get the title of the product to show on the page it's quite simple product dot title again tutorial on youtube if you want to watch that and then the third one which is the shopify platform itself you need to know where to look to edit certain things you need to know what templates to edit in order to edit certain pages how to create sections all that kind of stuff so now that you have those three things you've got those skills now what you can do is you can start looking for work now how i did it is going to be a bit unique to me not everyone's going to have this opportunity but what i did was i took my front-end web development skills and i took up a job working for an agency where i pretty much only worked on shopify e-commerce sites so all the kind of shopify specific training and experience i needed was in that first job that i took within this agency so that was a great learning experience for me and not only was it a good learning experience it was something to put on the resume and the portfolio i was able to tell people that i'd been working on these sites that i was working on in the agency but like i said i don't expect that everyone is going to have that opportunity so what i would recommend for most people is upwork upwork.com is the world's biggest freelance marketplace and the reason why i recommend using upwork is because number one that's how i got started with freelance web development i mean i i did get some clients locally when i was based in my home city of brisbane but then when i started traveling and wanted to gain clients consistently and remotely i started to use up work so that's why i would recommend upwork the thing with upwork is as long as you build your profile to a certain standard so we're talking about a high job success score and a top-rated badge and just like lots of five-star reviews or four and five-star reviews just good reviews in general you will start to get invited to jobs and you can update the service you provide to whatever and you'll still get invites something that's happened with my profile is i've never done a shopify specific job on upwork.com but i built up this experience and had five star ratings top rated badge 100 job success score and so when i changed my title to shopify i just got invites for shopify jobs i i definitely have those skills but it's not even demonstrated in my work experience on upwork itself and that's actually a hot tip because now upwork have an application process when i started doing up work ages ago i didn't have to go through any application process but i've heard now they're making it a little harder to get in so as a little hack something that i've heard people doing is putting in a different niche that's underserved in their application getting approved and then changing their niche changing their service once they're inside so the deal with upwork is you just want to build up a good reputation serving people that need your help and you can switch your profile to whatever you want later on so the great thing about freelancing with upwork is at the same time you're essentially building an asset in the form of your profile that with all those ratings you're going to get people approaching you and you're going to get invitations coming in for you on autopilot without having to send out proposals so upwork is what i recommend to most people getting started with online freelancing it's what i use to get started and again you're building an asset that's going to feed you work in the future but now i've kind of moved on and how i find work is through professional networking mainly through linkedin and groups and just personal connections that i have but it did take me a while to build up to that and so i do still recommend up work for beginners but that being said if you're a particularly confident person you're good at sales you can just start pitching brands straight away like now is the time uh you know at the time of recording this video we in this global pandemic and stores are being shut down like physical stores are being shut down and there's lockdowns and all sorts of problems now is the time if you are a store and you aren't on e-commerce now is the time to do it because it's more important than ever to be selling online because it's not susceptible to all the same lockdown laws as you know a physical retail store so i know for me in australia we've had some lockdowns we've had some pretty serious lockdowns in victoria you know now could be the time to pitch these companies that have physical stores that can't open on getting set up online i know a lot of people are flooding to the online space naturally shopify has exploded in popularity recently so this was always going to happen e-commerce was always the future but this whole pandemic thing has sped up the process so there's plenty of ways in which you can tap into this market demand this demand to move online and to use the most popular e-commerce platform in the world right now shopify so there is demand for shopify developers out there whether you find work through upwork or you pitch people find you know brands that haven't gone online yet or network with designers who design for e-commerce sites there's like so many different ways you can find clients in terms of upwork and linkedin i've shared my strategies on my skillshare channel so the linkedin one is the latest one if you want to check that out a link will be in the description but if you look at my skillshare channel overall i've i've kind of structured it now to be beginner web development then learning shopify and then finding clients through upwork linkedin there might be some other topics i do in future on freelancing but essentially i've kind of built the channel around that so definitely recommend you check out skillshare you can get like two weeks for free using my link below so if you hate it you can just leave after 13 days but i think if you're interested in this stuff you probably want to stick around been getting good reviews on the courses so they've been helping a lot of people and so if you want to go way deeper than this you know five to ten minute video you can just kind of go through the skillshare channel all right so forgive the plug there guys but that's essentially what the channel's there for it's to help you guys go through that process if you want to become a shopify theme developer obviously number one you're going to have to learn those skills so number one no front-end web development number two no shopify liquid number three understand the shopify platform and then it's all about kind of finding places where you can pitch brands and companies to work on their stores again upwork.com is my number one recommendation to get started but there are so many possibilities you might even want to use some of the strategies in my linkedin class on skillshare to reach out to brands directly maybe you have a really good pitch in mind but yeah essentially guys now is the time to get into this niche i'm very happy i got into this shopify theme development niche i think it's particularly underserved so definitely recommend you jump at the opportunity now of course if you have any questions leave them in the comments below i'd be happy to look through and answer them any requests for future videos obviously help me out and let me know what you want to see next on the channel as always guys thanks for watching the links to everything discussed will be in the description of this video and i'll see you on the next one

Channel: Code with Chris the Freelancer

Views: 19,673

Keywords: Chris the Freelancer, Code with Chris the Freelancer, Web Development, Digital Nomad, Learn to Code, Shopify Theme Developer, Shopify Developer, Shopify Expert, How to become a Shopify Developer, Shopify Partners, Shopify Web Developer, Web Developer, Shopify Liquid, Shopify, Skillshare

Id: N1547RcRaF8

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020