Christina Hall (speaker) criticizes Shopify "out of the box" stock templates, arguing they are visually obvious, poorly structured for conversions, and prioritize large header/logo areas and unreadable text overlays that push content down and present products without context. She defines a "converting website" as one that turns visitors into purchasers and says stock templates often fail at this.
Chapters
I make my out of the box Shopify template look less like an out of the box Shopify template. Stop using a Shopify template. There are so many clear cut signs that as a web designer, I can clearly tell any Shopify website I'm on when it's an out of the box Shopify template. By out of the box, they're meaning just kind of like the stock templates that you have options to choose for you with your subscription. And they're all so obvious. And the worst part about them is that every single one of them are very poorly designed for a converting website. If you're not familiar with what a converting website is, it's essentially a website that converts a visitor to to a purchaser. Essentially a website that makes you money. Stock Shopify website templates are like my number one offenders of websites because every single one of them has like this massive block at the top where it's just like your fucking gigantic logo sitting there, pushing all of your content halfway down your webpage, putting these stupid, like, you know, text overlay boxes over an image, and you're putting text over it, you can't even read it, and then just randomly shoving your products underneath all of it without any explanation.