Baamboo Studio Offers Custom Templates and Website Plugins to Help SMBs and Site Builders

TL; DR: Baamboo Studio, founded in 2012, offers a wide range of themes and plugins for websites running on Weebly and WordPress. The company helps entrepreneurs deploy ecommerce websites quickly and affordably while showcasing their brand identities. Moving forward, Baamboo Studio will continue to serve Weebly and WordPress customers with the long-term goal of expanding its full-service design offerings.

Building a website is intimidating for newbies, and that’s why many entrepreneurs turn to user-friendly hosting and site-building solutions. Weebly, for example, provides users with a range of built-in design templates and useful ecommerce tools.

Still, using Weebly is no guarantee that you’ll end up with a professional design. After all, most beginning website owners don’t have the budget to purchase pricey custom themes or hire expensive designers.

That’s where Baamboo Studio comes in. From its start in 2012, Baamboo Studio has focused on development and design for the Weebly platform. Starting with a small group of designers, the company created a first-generation Weebly theme and optimized the design for ecommerce sites. After 2013, with the launch of the Weebly App Center, Baamboo Studio was able to provide more than a dozen affordable solutions directly through Weebly.

“We have a lot of flexibility because we develop the Weebly apps ourselves,” said Nguyen Duc Trung, Head of Customer Service at Baamboo Studio. “We create every paid design with our own apps. That’s why we can do so much at a low cost.”

Although Square acquired the company in 2018, Weebly still exists as initially designed. Baamboo Studio serves this combined ecosystem by offering a series of paid templates and plugins for Weebly, as well as design for WordPress. The company provides free advice for customers and assists them with minor tweaks to default themes and apps.

The team also helps customers troubleshoot select compatibility problems.

“Our team is very small, but we’ve been around for quite some time, so we have a lot of experience in website design for Weebly and WordPress,” Nguyen said.

Major content management systems like Weebly, Wix, WordPress, and Joomla are versatile but not always focused. By design, they’re intended to be adapted to specific use cases. But stock platforms aren’t necessarily ideal for those particular use cases.

To optimize them, site builders must incorporate additional elements into the platform to extend its capabilities. Sometimes those elements are native to the platform itself — for example, a social media widget. But often, they’re too generic to be helpful, or they’re not present at all.

The most common way site builders enhance a website’s visual appeal is by applying a theme package. Themes, generally speaking, focus on aesthetics more than functionality. They impose different color and typeface options or subtly change how elements like widget boxes are rendered.

Plugins, on the other hand, extend the core features of the content management system. For example, WordPress — which enjoys a rich plugin market — cannot handle ecommerce, project management, help desk support, or discussion forums natively. Instead, vendors deploy tools ranging from WooCommerce to Vanilla Forums that turn the CMS into a one-stop shop for building an online presence. Armed with an array of plugins, many small businesses can run their entire company from a single login to their web server. Still, it’s a complicated process, which is why beginners often turn to Weebly instead.

“Most Weebly clients are small businesses, sometimes medium-sized organizations, but almost all of them are startups and small businesses,” Nguyen said. “Weebly doesn’t seem to have many ecommerce customers, perhaps as few as 10%. Most of them are primarily informational websites.”

Nguyen said Baamboo Studio believes its plugins and ecommerce features make a real difference for people who want to sell on the Weebly platform. These tools serve as an entry point to more advanced designs, including those developed through specialized design consultation.

Baamboo Studio’s customer support model allows users to tweak the code underlying its products. This flexibility is invaluable for startups that fancy a particular template or app but only need minor modifications to support their brand identity.

Users don’t have to be afraid of making mistakes, either. If a site designer breaks a theme or app, Baamboo Studio will help with basic troubleshooting for free. (As with most companies, more in-depth technical assistance will require a fee, particularly when the error doesn’t spring from Baamboo Studio’s code.)

In addition, the company will work with customers to extend the functionality of templates on a case-by-case basis. To help orient new customers to the Weebly platform, Baamboo Studio has developed an in-depth tutorial. For site builders new to Weebly and unsure of how to configure a new template, a combination of the tutorial and the company’s responsive support team provides enough expertise to get a site deployed quickly.

Baamboo Studio delivers more than a dozen different apps that extend Weebly’s core functionality. These apps are designed to work well with each other and with Baamboo Studio’s own themes. The apps — which include tools for creating sliders, testimonials, and customized buttons — provide functionality that Weebly’s base product cannot replicate.

“We’re focusing on building a worldwide customer base,” Nguyen said. “So many people use Weebly’s website builder — more than 1 million — so it’s important that they have the support they need.”

To that end, Baamboo Studio offers free design consultations. After supplying your business name, goals, and required site features, a designer from Baamboo Studio will deliver personalized guidance on how to structure your site. The designer will also recommend plugins and templates that will best meet your needs.

Baamboo Studio serves as a bridge between generic content management systems and customized site design. The company’s templates and apps extend the functionality of Weebly, helping startups make the most of this visual site design platform.

By offering free and paid design consultation work and customizations, Baamboo Studio helps site builders new to the Weebly ecosystem deliver great content quickly. That consultation work is part of the company’s long-term evolution.

“We will focus on turning our company into a broader website design agency,” Nguyen said. “People can come talk to us, tell us what they want, and we’ll do it. This is especially true for people who just need a website and don’t have a lot of interest in learning how to do it for themselves.”

Baamboo Studio augments the Weebly ecosystem through low-cost, high-quality templates and plugins. These tools help SMBs launch well-crafted, on-brand websites quickly and easily. The products and services offered by Baamboo Studio significantly decrease the time and cost it takes to develop a nongeneric website on the Weebly platform.

Given Weebly’s tight integration with Square for payment processing, this one-two combination gives ecommerce entrepreneurs a serious advantage.

“It costs money for us to develop an app or plugin or template, ” Nguyen said. “But we’ve done that already. So for our clients, we already have a plan for an appropriate website, and we can do it for them at half the time and cost.”