We've made use of default themes in Magento, and we can customize our Magento store further by using non-default themes. In particular, we'll look at:
Magento's flexibility in themes gives a lot of scope for possible uses of non-default themes. Along with the ability to have seasonal themes on our Magento store, non-default themes have a range of uses:
- A/B testing
- Easily rolled-back themes
- Changing the look and feel of specific pages, such as for a particular product within your store
- Creating brand-specific stores within your store, distinguishing your store's products further, if you sell a variety of the same products from different brands
A/B testing allows you to compare two different aspects of your store. You can test different designs on different weeks, and can then compare which design attracted more sales. Magento's support for non-default themes allows you to do this relatively easily.
Note
Bear in mind that the results of such a test may not represent what actually drives your customers to buy your store's products for a number of reasons. True A/B testing on web sites is performed by presenting the different designs to your visitors at random. However, performing it this way may give you an insight in to what your customers prefer.
If you want to make changes to your store's existing theme, then you can make use of a non-default theme to overwrite certain aspects of your store's look and feel, without editing your original theme.
This means that if your customers don't like a change, or a change causes problems in a particular browser, then you can simply roll-back the changes, by changing your store's settings to display the original theme.