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SuiteCommerce Theme Updates: Fallback Themes & Accessibility Improvements

What’s the first thing your customers notice when they visit your online store? Your SuiteCommerce theme. It’s the digital face of your brand, and it can make or break their experience from the moment they arrive. Whether it’s the overall design, ease of navigation, or even how accessible your site is, your theme plays a vital role in shaping how customers perceive your business.

NetSuite’s updates to SuiteCommerce themes are designed to give your eCommerce site a fresh, efficient, and accessible interface. From upgrading the base theme to adding new customization tools and simplifying maintenance, these improvements will help you offer a better shopping experience while making life easier for developers and non-technical users alike.

SuiteCommerce Theme Updates Fallback Themes & Accessibility Improvements

Table of Contents

1. A Fresh Look with the Updated Base Theme

The updated base theme is a clean, modern starting point for your eCommerce site. While it’s unlikely you’ll use the base theme as-is, it forms the foundation for all customized themes. Here’s how this update improves your site:
  • New global fonts, colors, and spacing for a modern look.
  • Enhanced global sections like the header, footer, and homepage for better usability.
  • More placeholder areas, allowing you to drop content easily via Site Management Tools.
  • Additional predefined skins that let you explore different color schemes.
 
This update makes it quicker for developers to create custom themes that reflect your brand’s style, while also ensuring you have a professional and functional eCommerce site.

2. Enhanced Accessibility: Interface Inclusivity

In today’s digital world, inclusivity is crucial. NetSuite’s updates make your eCommerce site more accessible to all users:
  • Improved keyboard navigation: Users can tab through pages in a logical order, making it easier for those who rely on keyboards.
  • Enhanced interaction with complex elements, like the mini cart, through keyboard shortcuts.
  • Better color contrast ratios for improved visibility, making it easier for users to distinguish elements.
  • Standardized font sizing and spacing for better readability.
 
With these improvements, you’re not only complying with accessibility standards but also ensuring a smoother experience for all users, leading to greater customer satisfaction.

3. Easier Maintenance with Fallback Themes

In the past, managing a custom theme was often a hassle, but with fallback themes, those days are over. Now, with the introduction of fallback themes, those days are over. Here’s how fallback themes make maintenance easier:
  • Automatic updates: If your custom theme is based on the updated base theme, it will inherit updates automatically, without requiring manual intervention.
  • Bug fixes and small improvements are applied seamlessly, so your site always runs smoothly without the need for developer input.
  • You’ll get notified in the SuiteCommerce Extension Manager when it’s time to reactivate your theme to take advantage of the these updates.
 
No more manually adding templates and stylesheets—fallback themes streamline the process, saving you time and reducing the need for ongoing maintenance.

4. Faster Development with Command Line Reactivation

If you’re using a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline for your SuiteCommerce site, you’ll love this update. NetSuite has introduced new Gulp commands that let you update and reactivate your site’s theme and extensions directly from the command line, without needing to access the NetSuite UI.
 
This means you can:
  • Reactivate existing deployments
  • Deploy and reactivate new updates
  • Automate the entire process, saving you development time
 
For developers, this is a game-changer, allowing for faster updates and smoother deployments.

How to Take Advantage of the Latest Theme

If you’re using a managed version of the base theme, you can update to V4 today and start realizing these benefits. If you’re on a custom or unmanaged theme, you may need to reimplement your theme using the new V4 architecture to access these improvements. SuiteCommerce Advanced users need to be on version 2023.2.1 to fully utilize the V4 theme.

Why These Updates Matter for Your Business

Keeping your SuiteCommerce theme updated isn’t just about aesthetics—it’s about delivering a better, faster, and more inclusive customer experience. With these updates, you’ll benefit from:
  • A modern, fresh look for your site that’s easy to customize
  • Improved accessibility, making your site usable by a broader audience
  • Seamless theme maintenance and updates that don’t require developer intervention
  • Faster development processes that help you get new features and improvements to market quicker
 
Whether you’re refreshing your site’s design, ensuring accessibility, or looking to streamline operations, these improvements to SuiteCommerce themes are designed to make your eCommerce site better for you and your customers. Stay tuned for an upcoming step-by-step installation guide on fallback themes.

UnlockCommerce Can Help!

At UnlockCommerce, we specialize in SuiteCommerce customizations that go beyond the basics. If you want to update your theme or leverage the latest features from NetSuite, we’re here to help. Whether it’s integrating complex extensions or optimizing your theme for performance, our team is ready to push the boundaries of what your eCommerce site can achieve.

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