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Basel Theme

Created with the eCommerce industry in mind, Basel is a premium theme launched in March 2016 by Xtemos, an Envato author. Basel comes with a minimalist look, emphasizing the essential: your content in a highly artistic way. Designed to work under WordPress environment, Basel will help you create a beautiful and attractive web store with 360-degree product view function and other impressive features.

Design

With simple and elegant lines, the Basel theme is a minimal, responsive and retina ready template. Powered by a drag and drop page builder, Basel will give your website the right touch you need to attract visitors.


When you want to build an online shop, a theme ready to give you a great start Basel is all you need. It comes with eleven demos available to download and import them on your website. You can view and access them on a dedicated sub-menu called “dummy content”.

You can set up some elegant looks for the theme’s header and footer areas, by choosing one of the six headers or 12 predefined footer layouts available. Basel also gives you the possibility to create beautiful portfolios and globally modify them from the Theme Settings panel using a predefined style, adjusting the container’s width and add a color scheme for filter links.

To bring more visibility to your product pages, you can use mega menus, and include widgets on sidebar sections to highlight the content with a touch of creativity.

As this is an eCommerce theme, the author created some special functions to help your visitors navigate and filter content on your website. Basel comes with a feature that allows you to showcase products in a 3D view mode, with the 360-degree view tool. This option will help customers see the product more in-depth and give more accurate reviews. A well-designed product presentation will grant you more sales and happy customers.

Also, an efficient Price Filter, along with different product category layouts and multiple shop page templates, are just a few of the many store features. Basel brings you another eight custom widgets and a review section for each product.

Functionality

Basel comes with a Theme Settings panel, which is very well organized in many sub-sections and gives you the opportunity to customize your website with ease. There are options related to General Settings, Global layout, header & footer sections, typography, social networks and other sub-menus that are relevant for eCommerce websites.

Basel is powered by the drag and drop page builder Visual Composer plugin allowing you to easily add blocks and elements on pages. This page builder comes with over 70 page templates to apply on your website. Visual Composer comes with both backend and frontend functionality.

With Basel you can add different formats to posts, like video, audio, quote, image, gallery or set a link as featured. Also, you have the possibility to add custom meta box regarding the sidebars, header, title size, set colors for backgrounds or texts, and more.

WooCommerce is an integrated plugin of the theme. The Basel’s authors went beyond the Visual Composer and Woo Commerce plugins’ functionality and developed another 17 custom block elements to give you even more flexibility to build the web store you desire. As mentioned before, this template is compatible with many plugins, including the custom Xtemos Post Types plugin and the Revolution Slider.

Basel comes with a child theme included in the main package to help users set up the needed customization, without altering the main theme files.

GENERAL
Item name Basel
Category WooCommerce
Type Premium
Author Xtemos
Envato elite author -
Tested version 1.7
COMPATIBILITY
Content width Full width
Browser compatibility IE8+ / Chrome / FF / Opera / Safari / Edge
WooCommerce Yes
bbPress Yes
BuddyPress -
WPML Yes
FONTS AND TRANSLATION
Integrated translation -
Google fonts Yes
Custom fonts -
Typekit fonts -
RTL support -
PAGE FEATURES
Page templates 75
Widgets 9
Header styles 6
Footer styles 12
Mega menus Yes
Sticky menu Yes
Social networks Yes
Instagram widget Yes
Portfolio styles 7
Shortcodes -
PRODUCT FEATURES
Catalog Styles 1
Product Page Templates 3
Customer Reviews Yes
Order tracking -
Filter products Yes
Wishlist Yes
Shop Page Layout 3
Product Category Layouts 4
WooCommerce block elements 17
Documentation Yes
Check-out page templates 1
WooCommerce version 2.5
Premium page builder Visual Composer
OTHER FEATURES
Demos included 11
SEO optimized Yes
Custom Theme Updater -
PERFORMANCE
CSS file size 860 kb
Overall speed Very high
USER EXPERIENCE
Total ratings 182
User rating
Learnability Medium
DESIGN
Responsive design Yes
Retina ready Yes
PREMIUM PLUGINS
Plugins Xtemos Post Types plugin, Revolution Slider, Visual Composer,
VALUE
Price $59
Value for the money Average

Performance

We have tested Basel’s default demo on different page speed tests, and it loads the content pretty slow.

Basel PageSpeed
Basel PageSpeed

Downsides

The theme offers you a list of Google Fonts, but unfortunately, the Basel template doesn’t give you the possibility to opt for a custom or Typekit typography.
The documentation provided by the theme’s authors is not as explicit as expected by WordPress beginners. Some video tutorials and more screenshots would be helpful.

Basel Theme Review
Category: WooCommerce
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Price: $59
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Conclusion
The Basel theme was released to compete in the challenging ecommerce industry. Almost all the theme’s functionality encircles its specific product tools. When starting a new online store, an important thing to have in mind is to optimize the website’s loading speed to give your visitors a great experience. Using the Basel template with its beautiful layouts, a 360 degrees product view, wishlists and a review system, every visitor can become a possible customer. Even a WordPress beginner can easily manage this template and its features, without a single line of code.
Good for
  • 360 degree product view
  • Many prebuilt demos
  • 9 custom widgets
  • WPML compatibility
  • Plenty of page templates
Not so good for
  • Auto-update theme feature is not available
  • Custom & Typekit fonts are missing features
  • RTL system
  • There is no shortcode system
Overall score:
73%
Awards:
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Lisa Jones
Editor-in-chief of WPion. 100% passionate about WordPress, Lisa is part time web developer and part time front-end designer. With a master's degree in computer science, she is specialized in CSS, HTML, JavaScript, MySQL and PHP. Lisa uses her knowledge and experience to offer you a complete analysis of WordPress most popular themes and plugins.

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