Basel Theme Review

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.

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.

Performance

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

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.