For all WordPress lovers looking to keep their hands on a free premium WordPress theme, you’re in luck. Over at FrogsThemes.com (our sister site), we’re offering all bloggers the chance to get their hands on a free premium WordPress theme, valued at $48. We have 4 great themes at the moment and a lot more in the pipeline, the most popular one being FolioGrid Pro, a 100% fluid grid based WordPress theme.

Pegasus Pro

A truly versatile WordPress theme, Pegasus Pro can be configured to focus on your work, your blogging, or both. Unlimited layout options and colour scheme variations. Pegasus Pro is also powered by the new FrogsThemes Options Framework.

FolioGrid Pro

Designed to be a fluid WordPress Portfolio Theme, FolioGrid has shown an impressive flexibility to be used for much more. Video embedding, fluid layouts and multiple colour schemes make FolioGrid Pro great.

Branded Pro

Easy to set up and customise, Branded Pro is the perfect theme for freelancers or agencies looking to create a professional looking website with stunning features, all with little or no knowledge of HTML or WordPress.

365 Pro

365 Pro is a high impact WordPress photography theme that boasts an array of features including auto-resizing images, EXIF data pages, fluid photo gallery, multiple widget areas and a professional looking blog.

I’m a blogger, how do I get a free theme?

If you’re interested in grabbing a free theme all you have to do is browse our gallery of themes and find the one that’s perfect for you. Once you’ve decided, simply write a post about FrogsThemes.com, making sure it full fills the criteria set out here and then let us know via the FrogsThemes.com contact form.

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Advanced Web Rankings (AWR for short) is a pretty well-known tool for rank checking websites against your chosen keywords and search engines. There are four licence levels – from $99 to $599. This looks great at first glance because unlike a lot of licences in the SEO world (SEOMoz for one), this is a one-time fee instead of a monthly or yearly renewal. There is a sort-of hidden cost however that we’ll look at later.

Basic Features

So AWR seems reasonably priced, but what do you get for your money? Well, the Standard Licence (the cheapest one) lets you rank check as many sites as you like and you get access to all the data you’d expect like ranking changes over time. The next level up (Professional) lets you create nice reports to print and email – great if you have clients or people to share the data with.

The Enterprise and Server levels give you access to keyword research tools (Wordtracker, Google Keyword tool and and there’s an API for others like SEMRuch and Google Webmaster Tools) – to be honest I use separate tools anyway so that isn’t why AWR is important for me. What I like is being able to rank check sites from any search engine – the Server licence which is the most expensive, actually gives you a proxy so you get accurate results from other countries.

Setting Up A Project

The AWR Project Manager is a tool that lets you set up and manage your rank-checking project. This could be something like “My Website Rankings” or “New Keyword Set”. You start by choosing which search engines you’d like to use – Google UK and US for example – and then you add your keywords. This is as simple as typing them in, although you can export from a file or URL. You then add as many websites as you like to be checked and choose what crawl depth you’d like AWR to go to.

Realistically, it doesn’t really matter where your site is after the first few pages, but setting a crawl depth of a few hundred results let you see if you’re popping in for any of your target terms.
It’s worth bearing in mind that the bigger the crawl, the longer it takes. AWR actually rests in between querying the search engines so that it reduces the risk of being blocked.

Once you click OK that’s it – the project starts running! You can manually pause or delete it at any time, and re-checking is as simple as forcing a new crawl or scheduling one. You can even set it to email you the results.

Top Sites

One neat little feature is the “Top Sites” tab which is part of your main project dashboard. This shows you up to 200 sites that rank above you for the selected keyword. It’s a great way to keep an eye on the competition and even find sites that are worth partnering with.

One Downside

The only annoying thing about AWR is that you have to purchase a Maintenance Plan after the first 12 months in order to keep getting updates and support. This costs from $29 to $119 and as we mentioned above, it’s not totally clear at first that you have to pay this (AWR talks about a “One-Time Fee”). I’m not entirely sure what would happen if you didn’t bother to buy a maintenance licence after 12 months – presumably it would continue to work!

Overview

AWR is an easy to use, solid rank-checking program. It’s got all the features you could want to check your own site, your client sites or your competitor sites, and the reporting is great for a quick overview. You can customise the reports and dig a lot deeper into various data, but from my point of view it’s the data at a glance that’s the most useful. AWR is the best rank checking tool out there at the moment so it’s well worth using for your clients or just for your own sites.

#####

Reply from AWR on 26th August 2011.

The application license does have a one time fee. Upon purchase, AWR comes with a 1 year maintenance plan, which provides free application version and search engines definitions updates. When the initial maintenance plan expires, you can continue to use the application at the version level we released before the maintenance plan has expired. Purchasing a new maintenance plan, which will bring new version and search engines definitions updates, is optional, as each user may consider is best for himself.

- AD, Advanced Web Ranking Support Team

In honor of Twitter’s fifth anniversary the folks at Visually have made the following graphic plotting out key milestones on it’s path to 200 million tweets a day.

According to Techcrunch…

The company hopes by the end of 2013 to have 1 billion users (more than Facebook) in addition to $1.5 billion in revenue and an over 5,000 person staff. Just typing out that sort of ambition is sort of painful when the service still shows me that I’m following people who I’m not and is all over the place with regards to a steady revenue stream.

Follow @thefloatingfrog

Over the coming weeks The Floating Frog is going to be rebranded and relaunched into a new site, repositioned to sell digital design and development services. Currently, and for the last 4 or so years, it has served proudly as a web design blog, bringing together the thoughts and experience of I, Gary Hartley, on all topics surrounding CSS, HTML, UI/UX, jQuery and so on. I’ve even had help along the way by a few friends whose posts have been both informative and well received. The new site will still host this blog but the emphasis will be put more on the products and services we will be offering. These are exciting times for me (The Floating Frog) and I hope you will join me in toasting to new endeavors and future success.

What did I do before starting The Floating Frog?

Well in summary I’ve been lucky enough to serve the last 10 years in 2 great digital agencies after training for 4 years in Graphic Design. My first role was in a start-up web design company called Save9 who was founded by two fine gentlemen. I was originally offered a temporary summer work placement that would take me up to the start of my top-up degree but with the ever growing success of the business and the opportunity I saw developing for me I decided to stay. Save9 branched out into 9 core product and service offers and more role became extremely diverse and exciting. Some of these offerings included VoIP systems, Bluetooth marketing, cinema touch-screen systems, data mining, eCommerce websites, mobile solutions and more. We were invited to the grand opening of Apollo Cinemas flagship cinema outlet which opened in London’s Piccadilly Circus and attended by a hat full of celebrities and the Countess of Wessex. Apollo Cinemas were the first privately owned cinema chain to go full non poster based advertising in their outlets and we were responsible to installing all the technical hardware plus delivering the rich media. We also traveled to the Cine Expo in Amsterdam to sell the concept to companies like Kodak and Coca Cola.

After nearly 5 years at Save9, I moved to Harrogate and became Senior Web Designer at 9xb, a full service digital agency. This role enabled me to specialise in online solutions and consolidate me UI/UX design skills while delivering bespoke solutions to clients that maximised their ROI and helped them engage with their customers better. I worked directly with some big brands yet gained more pleasure when I had the chance to work on new start-up projects as I could help turn a clients new vision into reality, rather than simply completing a to-do list for a worker bee at a larger company.

I have now gone full time freelance and work closely with a group of highly trained and experienced freelancers. In the 3 monthly since, we have already created an impact and are gaining a great reputation with the clients with have served. We have also worked with a few other agencies who outsource a lot of their work to us so I’m glad we can deliver such a service.

Plans for The Floating Frog

Primarily The Floating Frog will act like a shop window for our services, our work and our blog. We’ll use it to advertise our services straight to the end client and slowly cut down on the agency work as we get more established. One of our core strengths is our WordPress expertise. We seem to be getting a lot of job offers from agencies who have won a WordPress job but don’t have the skills to do it. I’d say 70% of our work at the moment is connected in some way to WordPress so there is obviously a real demand for it. It’s also important to educate both clients and agencies about the pro’s and con’s of WordPress and to help eliminate the dated persona that WordPress isn’t a via CMS and is just an insecure, low featured blogging platform.

We don’t just work with WordPress, but if a project is geared up to use it then I’d recommend it every time. For eCommerce sites and larger projects that require for of a bespoke solution then we work with the client and scope out the entire project and advise from there.

FrogsThemes.com

We have also started a premium WordPress themes company called FrogsThemes.com. This is where we develop off the shelf WordPress themes that are priced at the entry level market. So far it’s been a great success and we’ll soon be hitting the 1,000 premium WordPress themes download mark which is fantastic news. We also offer a lite version of the themes to give users the change to try before they buy. These lite versions are the same as the premium versions but without a few advanced features and support. These are very popular and we’ve already exceeded 20,000 downloads of those themes, amazing to think.

Core service offerings

These are still to be decided but in essence we all agree that we want to offer the full service to our clients so we can maximise their potential impact and growth after launch while gaining a good return on their investment. We already know the market is saturated with companies claiming to offer a full service but it’s important for us not to follow but more to specialise and be innovators in what we do best.

New Logo

This is potentially just an initial idea of the logo but we all agree it works pretty well for us. The pixelated frog (digital) in the center of the speech bubble (discussion and consultancy) with the name and tagline “Handcrafted websites”. Principally we’ll be focusing on websites, user interfaces, with great semantic and cosmetic builds that are positioned with SEO in mind. We’ll be cutting out the middleman and the bullshit most clients have to deal with when hiring an agency and focusing our efforts on delivering an end product that full filling the clients objectives, meeting timescales and budgets and ultimately is a pleasure to work on, for both the team and the client.

What do you think of the logo? It has potential to adopt colour and animation on hover and in other mediums but as a basis it’s good to see it stripped right back.

So hold tight, and come back soon. We are aiming to have the new site designed, built and setup in the next month or so. If you have any suggestions, comments, advice or spare staplers we’d love to hear from you….. oh L00k, we have comments enabled below

P.S. I haven’t checked for grammar or spelling mistakes in this blog post so please pull me up on any you see, I know you’re dying too!

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The World’s largest artwork – a somewhat intriguing premise for even the least artistic of people wouldn’t you agree?  I mean, how big could it actually be?

Well, prepare to be open mouthed at this nine square mile creation!

As with many artistic installations it is the final product that gets shown off, but because of how fragile nature can be, this is all about documenting the process followed by a fleeting moment of the final artefact as the wind and snows sets it.

Eight people and a broom led onward into Siberia by Jim Denevan created this somewhat temporary masterpiece on Lake Baikal, the world’s largest lake.  How apt.  Even more appropriate is leader Jim Denevan (who created the previous world’s largest artwork in the Sahara), is known for creating expansive and repeating patterns over endless scale.

Given the ferocious Siberian winds it’s a marvel the artwork survived in the tundra for as long as it did, making the photography and documentation of this work even more important than usual.

Living in a yurt in the centre of the lake the team survived by creating a daily fire (as the flames would periodically freeze), eventually giving up when ever so slightly warmer temperatures arrived and the circles melted away.

The complete experience has been documented in its entirety on The Anthropologist so do check it out.

Here’s a quick catchup on some of the hottest jQuery demo’s and plugin’s at the moment. For more information about each one simply click on the image under each heading to link to the demo site. If you have any others you wish to share please do in the comments belooow.

Quicksand

Reorder and filter items with a nice shuffling animation.

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Inspired by the Jacquard Loom, the first computer to use punch cards, artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese are looking to “marry traditional hand-woven crafts with information technologies” with their new project: Fiber Optic Tapestry.

The tapestry is set to be a nine panel work of art, woven by fiber optic threads (instead of traditional woolen threads) connected to RGB LEDs.  These LEDs are in turn connected to a computer which can control their outputs to create a wonderful array of patterns and colours.

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Here’s a really useful tool in our ‘really useful tools to share’ series of posts… you like that? Good, I’ll continue… If you’ve just finished collecting the Dr Who 2010 Merlin sticker collection and you’re frantically looking for another random collection to occupy your time then why not start a social usernames collection? Just imagine, owning your chosen username account on every social site on the web! Am I selling it to you yet? No? That’s good, you’ve passed the ‘I’ve got a life’ test. On the other hand if you have a legitimate reason for owning or checking the availability of a username on social sites, domain names and trademarks then this online tool is exactly what you’re after. Do it all in one search, type in a query and see which ones are available and which ones you can secure. They’re quite literally up for grabs.

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It seems only yesterday that we were getting annoyed with the vuvuzelas in the opening game as “Bufana, Bufana” announced the first African World Cup, but as we now approach the 2010 World Cup final we have become accustomed to the noise.  Hearing that buzz reach my ears stimulates excitement, the association that two of the best teams in the world are about to play out 90 minutes.

Alas, we are but days away from this event coming to a close, four long years away from the next.  Of course there will be replays and archived footage shown for months to come, the Blackstars’ dancing celebrations, Frank Lampard’s goal that never was, and of course Van Bronckhorst’s screamer against Uruguay.  But if you want a real lasting memory of the 2010 World Cup you should get yourself over to eBay and bid on one of these absolutely incredible pieces.

Oh, and did I mention all the proceeds go the Nelson Mandela’s 46664 Foundation? – a charitable organisation that aims to build a better world for everyone.  This campaign is a series of ‘Live Quest’ paintings.

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