Theme editor tour

Almost everything in Signal is edited in the Shopify theme editor at Online Store → Themes → Customize. This page is a map: what each part of the editor controls, and where to find the pieces that aren’t attached to a visible page.

The three areas

The template, in the middle

The section list for the page you’re currently looking at. Add, reorder, hide and remove sections here. Which page you’re editing is chosen from the dropdown at the top of the editor.

Header and footer groups

Pinned above and below the template list. These are section groups, so they’re shared by every page — edit them once and the change is everywhere.

Theme settings, behind the gear

Store-wide settings: brand, colors, typography, layout, motion, product cards, swatches, quick view and wishlist, cart, social links and the loading screen. Covered in full under Theme settings.

Switching pages

The dropdown at the top center of the editor is how you reach anything that isn’t the homepage. It lists:

• Home page — the index template
• Products → Default product — plus any product templates you create
• Collections → Default collection, and the collections list
• Pages → Default page, plus Signal’s nine preset page templates (about, contact, FAQ, lookbook, shipping, size guide, stockists, wishlist)
• Blog posts, Blogs, Search, Cart, 404 page, Password page
• Customers → account, login, register, order, addresses, activate account, reset password

Tip

Preset page templates only preview properly once a real page uses them. Create the pages first — see Pages and templates — then pick them from this dropdown.

Header group

Two sections, pinned at the top of every page.

Announcement bar

A rotating strip above the header. Add one Message block per line of text, each with optional link. Rotate cycles between them and Change every sets the interval in seconds. One message means no rotation, which is usually the right choice.

Header

Setting	What it does
Sticky header	None, Pin (always visible) or Pin and hide (tucks away as you scroll down, returns as you scroll up)
Logo	Optional. Leave it empty and the header prints your wordmark as type — the demo’s look
Wordmark	The text used when there’s no logo. Defaults to your shop name
Menu	The menu the navigation is built from. main-menu by default
Mega panel note	A line of copy shown in the panel’s side column when a menu item has no promo block
Parent link label	The wording of the row in the mobile drawer that leads to a parent menu item’s own page. [title] is replaced with the menu item’s name

Add a Mega panel promo block to feature a product or image inside one dropdown. Full detail in Navigation and menus.

Footer group

One Footer section with its own blocks.

• Wordmark and Blurb — the large footer signature and a sentence under it.
• Contact email, Stockists link and Policy menu (footer by default) — the utility row.
• Rights — the copyright line.
• Show payment icons, Show country selector, Show language selector — the bottom bar. The country and language pickers only appear if you’ve set up more than one market or language in Shopify.
• Menu blocks — add one per column of links; each takes a heading and a Shopify menu.
• Newsletter block — heading, body, button label and the confirmation message.

The parts that aren’t on a page

Four sections are rendered by the theme layout rather than by a template, so they show up in the editor’s section list on every page, and they can’t be removed:

Section	Why it’s global
Cart drawer	Opens over whatever page the shopper is on
Wishlist drawer	Same — the heart in the header opens it anywhere
Age verification	A gate that only covered the homepage would be bypassed by any link straight to a product. Off in the shipped setup
Promo popup	A promo a shopper never reaches isn’t a promo. On in the shipped setup — turn it off or rewrite it before you launch

Note

Because the age gate and promo popup are global, the theme editor always shows them even when they’re configured not to appear — otherwise you could never preview them. On the live storefront they respect their enabled setting, the remember-for period, and the visitor’s reduced-motion preference.

Sections, blocks and spacing

1. Add a section with “Add section” in the template list. Signal’s sections appear under their own names — Hero, Ticker, Drop countdown, Product mosaic and so on. A few offer more than one preset: Drop countdown ships as both a full Drop countdown panel and a thin Drop banner strip.

2. Add blocks inside a section by expanding it. Blocks are the repeating pieces: a slide in the slideshow, a plate in the collection grid, a question in the FAQ, a stockist, a review, a figure, a table row.

3. Reorder by dragging. This is how you restructure the product page — see Theme blocks.

4. Hide instead of deleting using the eye icon, while you’re still deciding. Hidden sections keep their content.

5. Set spacing per section. Nearly every section has Top spacing and Bottom spacing under a Section spacing heading. These are offsets against the global section_gap, so changing the global rhythm moves the whole page without you revisiting each section.

6. Choose the plane where offered: default (coal), white or deep. Alternating planes down a page is what gives Signal its rhythm — three coal sections in a row read as one long section.

Writing copy that uses the accent

Several headings are inline rich text fields. Wrap a word or phrase in bold and it renders in your accent color:

Deadstock only. <strong>No reprints.</strong> No apologies.

That’s how every two-tone headline in the demo is made — there’s no separate “accent text” setting to find. The fields that take it are the hero subheading, the Statement, Newsletter, Slideshow, Wishlist, Contact, Founder note, Timeline and Recommendations headings, the announcement bar messages, and the age gate and promo popup headings.

Caution

Shopify evaluates Liquid inside setting values, so avoid curly braces in copy fields. Signal’s Parent link label uses [title] as its placeholder for exactly this reason.

Saving and previewing

• Save publishes your changes to that theme — if it’s the live theme, they’re live immediately. Set Signal up on an unpublished theme while you work.
• The device icons switch between desktop and mobile preview. Useful, but no substitute for a real phone for the sticky header and the drawers.
• Actions → Preview in the theme library opens the storefront outside the editor. Some behavior — the loading screen frequency, the age gate’s memory, prefetch on hover — only behaves normally there.

Next step

Navigation and menus — the main menu, the mega panel and the mobile drawer.