Boomshaka: A New WordPress Solution For Artists

Update: Sites like Squarespace and Wix seem to have tackled a lot of these issues. This may be a good route to go for many artists to go. There may be a use for Boomshaka in the future, but for now this project is on hold. Thanks for your interest!

When you really get down to it, WordPress can be frustrating for image based designs. I’ve been using WordPress since 2008 and have helped many artists with their websites. I see a lot of the same problems. Navigation can be overly complicated and take too many clicks to see images. Images and galleries usually only look good on large monitors. Lightbox plugins look cool but they complicate analytics. Those are some of the big ones and those situations don’t even include e-commerce which complicates things even more.

I recently teamed up with master coder Jordan Kanter (also a longtime friend) to embark on designing a theme from scratch. We figured that given our knowledge we could design out a lot of common problems that we had noticed.

We’ve been working hard for the past three months. Today, I’m pleased to present the first live version of that code, which we call Boomshaka. You’re actually looking at it right now on this website. We saved a lot of time by using the amazing codebase from the underscores theme (thanks guys!).

We are currently in Beta testing and accepting applicants. As of this post, the Boomshaka theme has grown to solve more problems than initially intended. Here are some of the big ones:

1. responsive design and adaptive images (mobile and tablet friendly)
2. artist oriented usage of WordPress (rather than blogger oriented)
3. e-commerce ready (WooCommerce supported)
4. analytics on everything
5. easily (but not annoyingly) sharable
6. handicapped accessible
7. robust styles – allowing for easy browser minimize/maximize functions

If you would like a new beautiful website that uses our code we’re ready to help. We can also accommodate existing WordPress users with transitioning their site. Also If you have any feedback on the project we’d love to hear from you.