It’s been a very exhilarating week. Since launching the theme a few days ago, we’ve had some exciting feedback, are fortunate to have some great new clients using the theme, and now have some excited pioneers from all around the world, each building their own unique business website in two languages, using the Bilingual Shopify Theme.
Here’s The Gossip Since Monday’s Launch:
Big list of fun fonts to choose from, minimalist / clean look of the pages, and a wide range of settings be able to offer the best customer experience in the shop. The languages are easy to set up for anyone with basic computer skills.
– Client in Sweden
Bilingual Chinese and English is key for us – now we can sort that out thanks to this theme.
– Client in China
Very excited for this. The email templates are a great free bonus too!
– Client in Hong Kong
Note On The 1-Week Launch Special:
The time-saving, Shopify-compatible HTML Email templates to spruce up the emails you give customers, are still available for free when you purchase the theme as a launch bonus up until this coming Monday, 15th July, after which they’ll go back to their normal price of $40.
The most exciting part is: Our theme is now being used to build websites in Swedish, Spanish, Chinese, French, and more.
Thanks to the Shopify community and all you business owners out there for all the support. We can’t wait to see the amazing sites people will build with the theme.
Merci, obrigado, danke, gracias and ありがとう。
– Tristan and the team at Shopify Ninjas
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Thank you for checking out our Shopify Insider Blog @ Blackbelt Commerce. We also have some top blog recommendations for you to check out; How To Back Up Your Shopify Store, multilingual stores, 3 ways to increase your shopify conversions, mayor upgrade, bilingual theme, and Shopify Email Templates. Please make sure to check out our portfolio. Keep a lookout for new blog posts.
Questions? Just ask away in the comments.
Hi!
This bilingual theme looks awesome and I can not thank you enough for finally doing a bilingual theme for Shopify!
Before getting it I have few questions though:
. For the products, is it possible to get rid of the frame in order that the background of the product picture fits perfectly the wallpaper background? (is it possible actually to chose a grey background for the website and then use the same grey for product pictures? because i know that for black and white, usually there is no problem, but when it’s another color, it might be harder)
. I see that when scrolling on one product picture, we can display a second picture. (really cool). How many pictures can be displayed like this and is there any “transition” effect available?
. How many google fonts can be used for the website? Stupid question but google fonts can be viewed on any browser and device?
Thanks in advance for your help!
Hi Suzanne,
Thanks for your interest in our theme. To your questions:
– Products: Yes, sure. You could apply a background colour to the theme, and use that same background colour in your images. Applying the background colour in the theme (Shopify website) is just a case of clicking a few buttons in the Theme Settings – no coding required. You’d need to do the images manually when you create them, using the same colour.. and voila! It should look blended.
– Scrolling product pictures: Glad you liked it! At the moment, only two products can be shown. This is really because there are only two things happening with the mouse: you move your mouse over the image (1), then you move your mouse away from the image (2). I don’t think we’d be able to add more than that. We could organise some transition effects with a little custom development, but this would be a paid add-on (could be done within 1-2 hours.. our hourly rate is here).
– Google fonts: Not a silly question at all! Right now we have 22 Google Fonts enabled in our theme. You could easily add more, using the instructions for Shopify which are located here.
Just let me know if you have any other questions.
Thanks — Tristan.
Does your theme put both languages in the page source simultaneously? Doesn’t this confuse search engines and hurt on-page SEO?
Hi Nick,
Thanks for your comment. We’ve thought a great deal about this. The short answer is: Yes, the theme will put both languages in the page source simultaneously. At the moment, this is the most advanced solution there is for Shopify in terms of Bilingualism.
A potentially smoother solution in the long term would be to have different URLs for each language, so Google could index each page’s content individually. However, we’re somewhat restricted by the way Shopify works at the moment, and we feel this is still much better than having only one language.
Right now, though having two separate URLs, with the way Shopify works, would require having two separate product inventories, because each product is stored on its own URL, and there’s currently no way to ‘combine’ them. For example, it would need to be like:
www.mysite.com/products/product-one-en
www.mysite.com/products/product-one-cn (separate product & inventory to manage)
We don’t feel this would be feasible or good for store owners, hence the current solution.
As you’re probably aware, over 200 factors affect Google Rankings. This is just one of them. Having at least some text / keywords in the title tag & content is going to help for both languages. In other words, if you’re trying to rank for Spanish:
[My Product] in English only will do nothing.
[Mi Producto] would be best, but isn’t possible right now as mentioned above. Both languages’ content is stored in the page source.
[My Product | Mi Producto] is not the best possible solution, but it is better for Spanish rankings than having English only. For English only, you would get zero Google juice. With this, Google will still index the Spanish, even if it’s not as strong as a Spanish-only title tag.
The same thing applies for product content, page content, image tags, and so on. It’s not the best possible scenario, but still better than having no second language content being indexed at all.
Happy to take further suggestions / ideas. Thanks!