Exhibition pages the gallery publishes itself
An art gallery we work with runs a busy exhibition calendar, and their Shopify store had more than twenty exhibition pages live. Every one of them had been assembled with developer help, because the sections that make up an exhibition page had no controls worth mentioning. If the curator wanted the title over the left of the image instead of the centre, or a bit more room between the artist statement and the works, that was a code change.
What we did
Rather than redesign anything, we made the existing sections adjustable. The exhibition header gained a text position picker and a choice of how the artwork image fills its frame. A shared layout system went across the five section types an exhibition page uses, so width, padding and spacing are now settings, with separate values for phones. The home page picked up the same treatment where it needed it.
The contact page was its own small rescue. The details on it were stored in an app that had been abandoned on a free plan, which meant nobody could edit an email address without a developer either. We rebuilt that section on native theme blocks and carried the content across, so it edits like any other part of the theme.
Everything shipped with a recorded walkthrough instead of a manual, showing the team where each new control lives and what it does.
What to take from it
There is a version of this job that quotes a rebuild, and it would have been the wrong job. The theme was fine. What the gallery needed was for the decisions they make every month to stop living in code. If your team waits on a developer for changes that are really layout preferences, the fix is usually not a new theme, it is settings on the one you have.
