Odyssey Theme is a free open-source marketing website starter theme built with Astro for businesses and startups, providing landing page examples, a full-featured tagged blog, and contact form setup out of the box.
What is Odyssey Theme?
Odyssey Theme is a modern theme/starter for a business or startup's marketing website, built on the Astro static-site generator. It takes a set of Astro page templates, UI components, and CSS custom properties as input and produces a fully static, deployable marketing site with landing page examples, a full-featured blog with tagging, and contact forms pre-wired for Netlify, Formspree, Formspark, and similar services. The project is authored by Jaydan Urwin and offered free on GitHub, with optional sponsorship through Lemon Squeezy.
Key Features
- Perfect Lighthouse score — The template reports a perfect performance score in Lighthouse out of the box, backed by Astro's static output and performant local font setup.
- Full-featured blog with tagging — Includes blog pages with tag filtering so posts can be organized and surfaced by topic without a separate CMS.
- Themeable design system — Colors, buttons, shapes, backgrounds, and surfaces are controlled through CSS custom properties; a built-in theme switcher demonstrates changing the entire site's style with only a few lines of CSS.
- Responsive landing pages — Mobile-friendly marketing page layouts are included and adapt to different viewport sizes.
- SEO best practices — Open Graph tags, canonical URLs, and a sitemap are configured to help search engines index the site.
- Performant local fonts — Fonts are self-hosted instead of loaded from third-party CDNs, improving load times.
- Contact form integrations — Forms are pre-wired for Netlify, Formspree, Formspark, and similar providers; choose your service.
- Ready-to-use UI components — A package of Astro components covers common marketing-site elements like buttons, sections, and cards.
Who is it for?
- Startups launching a marketing site — Use the provided landing page templates and blog to publish a polished site quickly without designing from scratch.
- Business owners who want a customizable web presence — Adjust CSS variables and the theme switcher to match existing branding, then deploy to Netlify, Vercel, Firebase Hosting, or GitHub Pages.
- Astro developers looking for a starter — Use the theme as a foundation for client projects, extending the component library and following the setup and customization guides.
What can you do with Odyssey Theme?
- Launch a business marketing site — Set up landing pages, a blog, and contact forms in one project, then deploy to any static host.
- Publish a tagged blog — Write posts and organize them with tags using the built-in blog feature, with no CMS required.
- Experiment with theming — Use the theme switcher component to preview how changing a few CSS lines alters the entire site's appearance.
How does Odyssey Theme work?
Clone the repository, open the theme folder, run npm install, then npm start to start a local dev server. After customizing content and styles, build the static site and deploy it to a static hosting service; Astro's deploy guide covers Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages, and others.
FAQ
Is Odyssey Theme free?
Yes, the theme is offered free as-is on GitHub, with an optional donation via Lemon Squeezy to support continued development.
What tech stack does Odyssey Theme use?
It is built with Astro, along with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; the repository topics also list Lit and lit-html as part of the component setup.
Can I use Odyssey Theme for a non-business site?
While it is designed for business and startup marketing sites, its themeable design and blog features could be adapted for portfolios, documentation, or personal sites, though that is not its primary focus.
How do I customize the theme?
The project documentation includes a Theme Setup Guide and a Customizing the Theme Guide, both linked from the repository page, showing how to change colors, buttons, shapes, and other design tokens.
Where can I deploy a site built with Odyssey Theme?
Any static hosting service works, including Netlify, Firebase Hosting, Vercel, and GitHub Pages. Astro's deployment guide provides step-by-step instructions for each service.
Is there a live demo?
Yes, a live demo is available at https://odyssey-theme.sapling.supply/.
