BigCommerce – Developing on Stencil Theme Platform

Stencil is the new theme of BigCommerce platform that incorporates the latest best practices in technology, design standards, conversion, and SEO. It has introduced a flexible new approach for creating, beautiful and dynamic online stores on BigCommerce platforms. It allows you to build a stunning storefront that engages shoppers and encourages checkouts on any device. Merchants and developers can choose from the best responsive eCommerce templates in the market or build a completely custom website.

Stencil allows the merchants to have multiple variations on each theme which helps to customize the look and feel of the online store without any code. It also offers certain new components for both developers and merchants that are new to BigCommerce platform. The new features of Stencil are discussed below which can help the merchants as well as the developers to customize the online store.

• Stencil Developer Toolkit: This toolkit offers a flexible local development to the developers to design and customize the themes with no disruption on the merchant’s live store.
• Theme Editor: This is a browser based tool that enables the merchants to customize the attributes like font, color, various functionalities, etc of the web store without any code.
• Storefront: Merchants can get the themes and apply them to the storefronts after customizing them which results in an elegant user experience that goes with their brand making it simple for the customers to find and purchase the products they want.

Stencil works under some of the most revolutionized aspects which makes it stand out of the crowd.

• Speedy Development: Stencil theme platform offers libraries and components that are ready to use which helps to create eCommerce websites in less time resulting in the increase of the productivity of the developers.

• Local Development: Stencil creates local environment which is very close to the real website that fetches the real time data through its API. The final testing can be done on this clone environment which will spare the extra time in adjustments on the live store.

• Reduced Errors: Testing phase of an eCommerce website results in various development errors due to which there can be a downfall in the sales. The clone environment created by Stencil helps in reducing the online errors as the final testing is done locally.

• Shareable Development Work: BigCommerce Stencil assigns an IP address that can be shared with the merchant by the developers to share the development process with the merchants. This will help in the coordination between the two and the real time feedback from the client will help in sparing a huge amount of time.

TBI developed designs of various websites on the new BigCommerce Stencil platform. Our strategy was to fetch their new and modern designs and build them using modern development practices. In doing this, we created robust eCommerce themes that are focused on speed, accessibility, and the best in modern SEO practices.

• Search Bar: With the new BigCommerce Stencil framework, our dedicated BigCommerce experts have much more freedom when desiring to meet the demands of the clients. One of our client wanted the website to be focused around a custom search bar. Our developers not only built the search functionality but also made the results to be displayed inline which helped users to find the items more easily.
• Responsive: Lightweight, SEO friendly and responsiveness are the basic three principles that we include in every website and absence of these three characteristics is not acceptable at all. Our developers were able to create websites that have super light code, friendly to SEO engines and most importantly responsive for all the devices.

The changes made by our experienced developers really put our clients’ websites on top and made it a smooth process to apply new templates and functionalities. If you would like to see what Stencil can do for your website contact us for more info.