I am interested in the Shopify Theme Specialist and I needed to set up a website in Shopify as part of my application for consideration.
I used the 14 day trial to play around with Shopify. My biggest problem was that I didn't have a product in mind and therefore I changed my mind a number of times as to the types of products that I would sell through the site. My original thought was that I didn't want to sell the ubiquitous tee shirt which was a favourite of all the training sites. I was going to be different. However, I eventually gravitated back to something akin to this, i.e. woolen sweaters. Don't try to be too smart. Lesson learned.
Once I settled on a product, it was then a matter of finding a name and suitable logo for the site. If I were really in business I would have decided on a professional logo that could be designed and sized to fit my business and website. I finally decided to download a font from Google Fonts and use this as the logo. The logo size is dependent on the device and orientation (for mobile devices). Also, for smaller devices such as phones I do not display the company address as this takes up valuable space.
I then looked for images on the web for the type of products I was selling, in my case Celtic woolen products. There is an abundance of these available online which I downloaded for use. Please note that these images are not and will not be used for any commercial activity and are only for presentation purposes.
The process of setting up the site was straightforward - products, collections, pages, navigation etc. I then tried out a number of themes and finally settled on Simple as I like a clean and sparse look (I'm tempted to call this the Google look).
I set up taxes and shipping rates even though I could not fulfill orders on the 14 day trial.
Editing the .liquid and .css.liquid files was more problematic, not that Liquid itself is difficult to understand (indeed it simplifies matters in that server side coding is abstracted away from the developer and he/she can concentrate on user issues). It is more that these files are very big so finding the element(s) that you wanted could be tricky. Thank God for Chrome's Inspect tool!
I enjoy learning things. It get my juices flowing. So I must say that I found the whole process thoroughly enjoyable.
In conclusion, I have a good knowledge of HTML, Javascript, jQuery and CSS and I believe that these would be invaluable assets to carry with me to such a role.
Here's hoping!!!