Basalt WordPress Theme

Year: 2020

Work Type: Self-Initiated

basalt portfolio theme for wordpress

During the process of showcasing my personal portfolio, I explored web design and development. This is the first ever WordPress theme that I designed and developed (right from scratch!) over the span of four months. During this process, I ended up teaching myself end-to-end development of a custom WordPress theme.

The theme was wireframed, designed and prototyped in Adobe XD while it was developed in Atom using HTML, CSS, JavaScript & PHP (the WordPress ecosystem runs on PHP). The layouts are enabled by the Bootstrap framework (v.4.5). Site caching and CDN is managed with LiteSpeed.

I started making this theme for my personal portfolio but it has now evolved into an open-source project. Although this particular theme won’t be available for download as it was designed with my requirements in mind.

A separate WordPress theme called Granite is underway, and has specially been designed for a more generalised public use and with a tonne of more features than Basalt currently supports. Granite will soon be available for free download for both personal and commercial use under Creative Commons Attribution – CC BY-SA 4.0

about the theme

Basalt is a light-weight, super-fast classic portfolio theme with an unobtrusive user experience. It was designed as a desktop-first, fully responsive WordPress theme that works equally great on all sizes right-up till the extra-small size.

Theme features include: a Blog, a Custom Front-page, a Custom Header & Footer, full support for the WordPress Gutenberg Editor, Sidebar, Widgets, Featured Images, Sticky Header, Parallax transitions, Custom Logo Support, etc.