Baamboo Studio: Lean, mean Weebly themes

“Sagano Bamboo forest, Arashiyama, Kyoto” by Casey Yee is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

As anyone who’s ever used ​Weebly will tell you, the popular website builder isn’t known for having the most cutting-edge or flexible themes. In fact, many of them suffer from uninspired designs and a lack of customization options that limits their potential. This really is unforgivable when you consider how many ​excellent alternatives are out there.

To Weebly’s credit, they do leave the door open to third-party developers who offer more premium themes than the stock selection that’s baked into the platform.
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Vietnam-based ​Baamboo Studio is one of the more popular developers in the Weebly ecosystem. One look at their selection of feature-rich themes and it’s easy to see why.

What’s not to Leica?

Finding that ever-elusive “perfect theme” comes down to two things: personal preference and your specific use case. I was building a website to showcase my professional content writing services, so I needed something simple yet elegant that I could tailor to my personality — preferably without having to touch a single line of code. While any of Baamboo’s themes would fit that description, one in particular stood out to me.

Leica, with its bright, crisp UI, is a minimalist’s dream. The clean, modern design rivals the very best Wix or Squarespace have to offer. Pages are laid out in a very intuitive way, making navigation a real pleasure. Leica comes complete with a variety of page layouts; from the uber-trendy one pager to traditional landing pages, blogs, and more.

Some enhanced theming

Baamboo also sells some nifty add-ons, such as sliders, buttons, and animated headlines, that take the functionality of your website to the next level. Two of my personal faves are Testimonials, which makes your recommendations pop in a way that LinkedIn never could, and X Divider, a stunning way to jazz up the transitions between sections. These apps work flawlessly in the Weebly editor and behave just like native apps. As with the themes themselves, Baamboo’s apps come with clear and well-illustrated documentation to help you get the most out of your purchase.

Baamboo’s got your back

Another thing that Baamboo Studio gets oh-so right is customer support. As I discovered, it’s not just their themes that are responsive — Founder Quang Tran typically replies to my emails within 24 hours, which is impressive given the time difference between us.
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I reached out to him recently with an issue I was having linking to an external website from the navigation bar (this happens to be a limitation of the one-page layout I’m using). Just as I was about to throw my hands up in defeat, Quang came through with a custom tweak that worked like a charm. It’s that level of dedication and can-do attitude that will keep me a Baamboo fanboy for years to come.