Bringing Your Banner to Life: Animating Text in Shopify’s Ride Theme

Once upon a Tuesday morning, while sipping on my lukewarm coffee and pretending to be a morning person, I decided to add a little pizzazz to my online store. You know, that extra flare that makes your banners as captivating as the gossip in a cozy small-town café. Then I stumbled upon the mesmerizing text effects on Shopify’s homepage, and boy, was I hooked! “If Shopify can do it,” I thought, “so can we,” right?

We embark on a journey today to animate text for our online store — particularly using Shopify’s Ride theme. You can imagine this as having that heart-to-heart chat about life’s possibilities, where coding meets creativity and you envision endless animations with vivid texts that dance gracefully across your homepage banner. Sounds magical? Let’s make it happen!

Deconstructing the Dream: What We Want

Here’s the plan, no hard hats needed. Picture this: You’ve got your main image banner, bold and proud on your homepage, and just beneath the “Be the next…” mantra lies a string of dynamic text phrases that change, blink, and reveal themselves like a magician’s grand finale.

But how do we weave this magic in the Ride theme? A dash of HTML here, a sprinkle of CSS there, and a good serving of JavaScript, et voilà, we’re golden. Trust me, the gravity of seeing those words come to life is like discovering a cat video compilation you’ve never seen before.

Step One: Setting the Stage with HTML

There was this moment back in time — a simpler time when the only stressful decision was picking which cartoon to watch. Simplicity is key, even here. We start by opening our theme’s code editor.

• Head over to your Shopify admin, navigate to Online Store > Themes. Look for the "Actions" button next to the Ride theme and select Edit Code.
• Find the file where your homepage banner is defined. This is usually a section file with a name like homepage-banner.liquid or hero-banner.liquid.
• Insert your HTML for the changing text below your main headline. Something like:

<h1 class="main-heading">Be the next</h1>
<p class="changing-text">Innovator</p>

Saving at this point is like that satisfying moment when you finally untangle your earphones.

Step Two: Breathing Life into Text with CSS

Think of CSS as the wardrobe department of your animation project. It’s all about style — that touch of finesse that makes everything come together.

• In the same code editor, find your main stylesheet. We will be adding some styles to make the text not just exist but shine like the stars on prom night.

.changing-text {
  font-size: 2em;
  animation: fadeText 3s linear infinite;
}

@keyframes fadeText {
  0% {
    opacity: 0;
  }
  50% {
    opacity: 1;
  }
  100% {
    opacity: 0;
  }
}

Save your changes and imagine a tiny confetti cannon going off in celebration; we're halfway to animating text amazement!

Step Three: Making Magic with JavaScript

Here’s where it gets especially creative, like when you decide today’s the day you’ll finally learn how to juggle. We use JavaScript to handle the changing part of our text rhythm.

In your theme’s code editor:

• Scroll down to find a JavaScript file, often located in the assets directory. Look for something intuitive, like theme.js.
• Add the following code snippet to cycle through your words:

document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function () {
  const words = ['Innovator', 'Trendsetter', 'Leaders']
  let i = 0
  const changingText = document.querySelector('.changing-text')

  setInterval(function () {
    changingText.textContent = words[i]
    i = (i + 1) % words.length
  }, 3000) // Changes every 3 seconds
})

Now, picture us doing a short celebratory dance because this is the moment the magic really materializes. Your text is now changing just as we imagined it would!

A Moment of Reflection: Revel in Your Creation

Ah, the beauty of seeing “Innovator” transform into “Trendsetter.” It’s almost poetic, like spotting a double rainbow while driving home after a hectic day. These small moments of creativity, where a few lines of code animate our dreams, remind us how wonderfully interconnected storytelling and technology can be.

We’ve made our homepage banner dynamic, alive, and interesting — not unlike the comforting chaos of a bustling Saturday market. And while we might not have reinvented the wheel, we certainly added a delightful spin to it.

In the end, it was about more than just some changing text. It was about the shared experience, the creative endeavor, and the joy of bringing something beautiful to life on our online store. Now, as we sip our coffee (slightly warmer this time), we can stare proudly at our handiwork, ready to take on the next digital adventure together. Cheers!