Ryder
Ryder is the free theme Arts-Link builds and maintains in the open. It is MIT licensed, which means anyone can use it, modify it, learn from it, or fork it with very few restrictions. No account, no subscription, no permission needed.
Client work is where the theme gets its education. Every project reveals what actually matters — not what sounds impressive in a feature list, but what makes a real site easier to launch, easier to edit, and easier to keep alive years later. Ryder is where those lessons go once they generalize: sensible metadata, responsive navigation, image galleries, dark mode, accessible defaults, search and AI metadata, privacy-friendly analytics hooks, and template overrides that don’t require forking the original files.
The point isn’t to make every Arts-Link site look the same — serious client work needs its own design system and its own decisions. The point is that the boring, foundational parts of that work are worth sharing rather than rebuilding privately every time.
It’s built on Hugo, and it credits the projects it learned from: the Hugo community, PaperMod, and hugo-theme-gallery.
The example site linked above is the theme running live — the fastest way to see what it does before reading a line of code.