Explorer – Free Photography Website Template Using Bootstrap

Yes. Explorer is free to download and use, including for a paid client portfolio, under the standard uiCookies license. Attribution details are on the license page. There's no premium upgrade or paywalled version — what you download is the complete template.

Yes. Explorer is a plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript template — no Node, npm, or build step required. Open any of the five .html files in a code editor, change the text and swap the images, and refresh your browser to see the result. Upload the folder to any static host or web server and it runs as-is.

The template uses a single typeface, Abel, loaded from Google Fonts via a link tag in the head of each page — swap that link and the font-family rule to change it. Colours, including the warm bronze accent, live in the CSS files inside the css/ folder (start with style.css); edit those values to restyle. The styles are plain CSS, so no preprocessor is needed.

Yes. Explorer is built on Bootstrap 5's responsive grid, so layouts reflow cleanly from desktop down to phones. On small screens the desktop menu is replaced by a burger button that opens a slide-in drawer with your navigation and contact details. The photo grids and project gallery stack into a single column on narrow viewports.

No. The project page's lightbox is built in with vanilla JavaScript — click any photo to open a full-screen view with previous and next arrows. It replaces heavier third-party libraries like PhotoSwipe, so there's nothing extra to install, load, or configure.

Once a photo is open, the left and right arrow keys move between images and the Escape key closes the lightbox. On-screen prev/next controls do the same thing for mouse and touch users. It's all handled by the template's own JavaScript, with no external dependency.

The contact form is front-end only — its name, email, and message fields are ready, but it doesn't send email on its own because Explorer is a static site with no backend or payment processing. To make it work, point the form's action at a form-handling service or your own server-side script. There's no CMS built in either; you can wire the pages into a CMS or static-site generator yourself if you want editable content.

Explorer works in all current versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. The download includes five HTML pages (home, services, about, project, and contact), the CSS, the vanilla JavaScript, the Icomoon icon font, and sample photography so you can preview it immediately. Replace the files in the img/ folder with your own photos to make it yours.