Don't use at the moment the new free themes (Sense, Craft, Crave)

Store Design
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Hi,

I will explain why you should not use at the moment the new free themes - Sense, Craft, Crave.

I used the debut theme before and everything went smoothly. When I saw the new versions’ demo mode, I realized the Craft theme will suit my site better.

  1. I found lots of bugs, for example the pictures in some sections are not located where you wanted, if you chose “center” but it’s in the left. Same with font sizes and style, same with card view or simple view, you choose something and have somthing else.

  2. It’s easier to choose background and accent colors, but way harder to play with the given choices all over the website

  3. Shopify released these themes without enough testing, which means that you will be shocked to find things that are not working, tomorrow they will work, in two days they will not, apps you installed will work, two days after they will not. It happened to me all the time.

  4. Crashes - I worked 2 times for hours changing code, customize my website when suddenly the Shopify system crashed, all my work got lost, even part of it which I saved, is gone, by Shopify policy they are not covering these issues

  5. Not enough tutorials, not enough knowledge in this community, Reddit communities and Shopify chat support. Sorry, it’s not personal for this community, but you will a lot of what you will looking for in any place. So you will be stuck and try to figure out by your own what to do - wasting a lot of time and energies

  6. Shopify’s developer did a terrible job with the architecture. So now with the Shopify 2.0 you can easily pick up sections without using code, but it’s super tiny problem compare to the lack of smart development, you will notice every single time that if you want to do a small thing different, you can’t, so you will need to pay developers to do it. And if you are a developer you will be noticed as I am that the solution is so bad that you will do some “tricks” to make what you want to work, but it will also slow down the website because most of the dev solutions are blocked by these themes’ architecture

Hoped that helped

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Thanks! This was very helpful. I was just about to start working on switching from Motion to Sense.

What I liked about Sense:

  • I like the aesthetic way more than Motion.
  • I also like the way variants are neatly displayed on the product page, especially on Mobile.

What I didn’t like:

  • I found you can’t add (Video Hero) and you will have to use YouTube or Vimeo links only.
  • It also doesn’t cross out/fade out the variants that are sold out prompting the visitors to actually click on the variants one by one to see if they are available or sold out (Motion shows sold out variants easily).

Have you tried Dawn? How is Dawn vs Debut?

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Hi @maljuaidi ,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Trust me, if you will start working on one of these themes including Sense, you will find the things you didn’t like so tiny compare to other major problems that will take time and energies from you.

Good luck with building your store :slightly_smiling_face:

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This problem persists:

The editor is horribly laggy (can be mitigated by working with Shopify CLI, but it horribly inconvenient when testing themes to see if you would like to go further with them)

A number of inexplicable behaviors including element placement, which aren’t obvious at all where they are caused from.

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