A section architecture your marketing team won't break

Online Store 2.0 put sections on every page, which means your marketing team can, in theory, build a landing page without a developer. In practice, a lot of themes make that painful: too many settings, sections that only work with one kind of content, and layouts that fall apart the moment someone uploads a different image.

This is how we structure themes so the people who run the store day to day can actually use the editor.

1. Start from what marketing builds

Before writing any Liquid, list the pages the team actually makes: launches, collection landing pages, seasonal campaigns, press and about pages. Then look at what those pages have in common. Most stores need far fewer section types than they think, perhaps ten or twelve well-built ones, rather than forty that each solve one page.

2. Sections for layout, blocks for content

Treat a section as a layout: a split image and text, a grid, a carousel. Treat blocks as the content inside it: a heading, a paragraph, a button, a product. When content lives in blocks, the same section can serve a launch page and an FAQ page without a developer making a variant. Theme blocks make this even more flexible, because one block can be reused across many sections.

A good theme gives your team fewer decisions to make, not more.

3. Fewer settings, better defaults

Every setting is a decision someone has to make, and a way for the page to drift off-brand. Instead of exposing padding in pixels, offer a select with small, medium and large. Instead of a font-size slider, offer heading styles. Give each section presets that already look right, so adding one to a page produces something good before anyone touches a setting.

4. Styles, not one-off colours

Free colour pickers on every section are how a store ends up with eleven slightly different blacks. Define colour schemes and a type scale once in the theme settings, then let sections choose from them. When the brand evolves, you change it in one place and every page follows.

5. Build in guardrails

The section schema gives you real tools for this. Use max_blocks and per-block limit so a grid can't be filled with thirty items. Use enabled_on and disabled_on to keep product-only sections off the homepage. Write sensible fallbacks for missing images, and test every section with a very long heading and a very short one.

6. Name things like a marketer

"Image with text, v2" means nothing to the person building a launch page at 6pm. Name sections and presets after what they're for, like "Product story" or "Press logos", and use the info text on settings to explain what each one does and what size of image works best.

7. Hand it over properly

A theme isn't finished until the team can use it without us. We build a hidden reference page in the store that shows every section with its presets, and record short walkthroughs for the jobs the team does most often. It's the cheapest way to make sure the design still looks right a year later.

Where to start

If your current theme is hard to work with, you probably don't need a rebuild. Start by auditing which sections are actually used, merge the near-duplicates, and replace the free-form settings on the most-used ones with presets and styles. Most of the pain goes away there.