New Feature: Themed Site

Until now, your public site for your Simplero account has been a simple catalog of your products. If you wanted a site with more content on it, you'd have to have a separate site hosted on for example WordPress.

Today, we're changing that by introducing a major update to your public site, and one that we're very, very excited about. Instead of just being a catalog, it is now a full featured website including a blog and pages that you can control the content of, sporting a brand new design to boot:

For those of you impatient to get started, you can find the administrative interface for the new site in the menu on the left hand side of the administration panel for your Simplero account:

Theme

The new public site is built around a new concept in Simplero: themes. Themes give you a lot more flexibility in what you can customize about the look and feel of your site. Not only that, but you can browse around your site while adjusting how things look in the new theme customizer – pretty neat, right?

For now, the adjustments you can make are limited to the options available in the theme customization interface. Once any little problems that might appear have been ironed out, we're going to open up for you to edit all of the HTML, CSS and JavaScript that powers the theme, so you can truly make it your own.

We're starting out with one simple theme, Simple, which has a clean, modern design, that works well on anything from the largest screen all the way down to tablets and phones.

In the future, we'll be adding more themes for you to choose from. We're still on the lookout for great designers to take a crack at designing a site, so if you've worked with any, please send your recommendations our way.

Pages

Even better than just being able to customize the look and feel of your site, you can now build your site with beautiful, flexible pages in any structure you want. Just like when customizing your theme, you can see what your site will look like as you're editing it, and you can type your text directly on the page as you do so:

Each page is made up of a number of different sections, each allowing for different types of content. In other words, a page doesn't just have to be plain text. Instead, you can add content like an FAQ, your Instagram feed, a cherry picked list of products you want to feature, or maybe beautiful looking testimonials:

However, your site is not limited to only pages. You can build the navigation structure of your site exactly as you want it, including direct links to products and other sites:

Blog

As mentioned, the new public site also includes a blog, so you can now use your Simplero site to publish your news and writing. One cool thing is that you can use all your media files on your blog as well, so you no longer have to upload your content in multiple places:

Start using the new themed site

We know that major changes take some preparation, so while the themed site is available for everyone today, you have to manually make the switch from using the old public site to the new public site. Simply click on Site in the menu bar in the administration panel for your Simplero account, and you will be shown this notice:

We strongly recommend that you preview the new site first by clicking the "Preview themed site" button to make sure that everything is as you want it to be, before you make the switch.

Share your thoughts

We're super excited about this addition to Simplero, and we can't wait to see what you build with it! Over the coming weeks, we're going to be tweaking the design and adding more options to the new sites. As always, we're here to help answer any questions you may have, and we welcome all your feedback and suggestions for the new themed site.