Frog's Digital Design Blog » Gary Hartley

Free premium WordPress themes for bloggers

Gary Hartley — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 18:04:31 +0000

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.

Full details of this offer here →

Rank Check Your Site With Advanced Web Rankings

Gary Hartley — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 16:14:53 +0000

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

Twitter infographic celebrating 5 year anniversary

Gary Hartley — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 07:59:28 +0000

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

New era for The Floating Frog

Gary Hartley — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 12:00:06 +0000

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!

Grab this 25% discount code for FrogsThemes.com

Gary Hartley — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 11:08:24 +0000

FrogsThemes.com is our partner site that sells awesome WordPress themes. We thought we’d offer a 25% discount on our WordPress for a limited period only. Why not visit FrogsThemes.com and grab a delicious 25% off while it’s valid.

10 Advanced jQuery Demo’s and Plugin’s

Gary Hartley — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 21:03:26 +0000

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.

Flip

Flip is a jQuery plugin that will flip easily your elements in four directions.

Slideout Tips

Slideout tips with jQuery and CSS3

Photo Zoom Out Effect

A jQuery image zoom out effect

Sliding Boxes

A slick jQuery plugin with multiple transition options to on hover of an image.

Puzzle Menu

A beautiful jQuery image and menu transition plugin

Avia Slider jQuery Image Slideshow

A unique jQuery image slideshow plugin with multiple transition modes to choose from.

jQuery Background Image slideshow

An elegant jQuery background image plugin.

Cloud Zoom

Image zoom powered by jQuery.

iCarousel

A horizontal image slideshow jQuery plugin.

Check Availability of Social Usernames, Domain Names and Trademarks with one search

Gary Hartley — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 16:29:24 +0000

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.

Bill Murray

So let’s pretend I’m Bill Murray, the legend that is (this guy has a direct line to my funny bone). I want to know which TLD‘s for www.billmurray. are available and which social sites I can register as billmurray.

Crap, no usernames are available for the top 10 social sites but there are both trademarks and domains available. Now, what can I do with the domain name www.billmurray.tv? Is he still on TV? Has he ever been? Films yes but TV? Sorry I’m meandering off the point.

The point is – whether you’re a Joe Blogg‘s or a business you can use ud.com to check and protect your online identity, all with one quick search.

Know of a better tool for the job?

Then let us know in the comments belooooooow.

Tweasier, The New Twitter Tool

Gary Hartley — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:29:07 +0000

Tweasier, the brand new Twitter management tool, went into open beta while I was on holiday. I’ve heard a lot of good things about this application (created by PR and social media guru Chris Norton), so I thought I’d join up see just what Tweasier offers.

Now, I’m not new to Twitter applications. I’ve used various desktop and iphone clients and I normally change them every so often because I need some functionality they just don’t offer. One of the big things for me is being able to sort people I follow into different groups so they’re easier to manage. Tweasier has loads of pre-set groups so this is easy. In fact, the whole aim of Tweasier seems to be to make things easy. The interface is really clean and tidy, and all your information is laid out at a glance.

There’s a Twitter client just like you’d expect, so you can tweet from within the application. You can search for users based on whatever criteria you like, and your searches are saved so you don’t have to perform them again – this is really cool and helps you find new people without really having to look. One thing I really like is the ability to see conversations between users, so there’s no more trawling through profiles to find out who said what to whom.

So it’s slick and useable – so far so good. Where Tweasier actually stands out for me is the analytics package. There are built in analytics that tell you pretty neat things like who your most influential friends and followers are (great if you want to get into a conversation but you’re not sure where to direct your attention). Okay, so ordinary people might not care so much about statistics, but imagine you’re a business and you need to report on these things. I think the future of the app is with businesses and agencies – people who literally “manage” Twitter accounts and need to report on them.

So far, Tweasier is just in beta and improvements are still being made, but a Pro version looks like it will be available soon. This will probably include things like more elaborate reports and be aimed at agencies. At the moment the cost looks to be under £10 a month, and for those kinds of reports I think it’s well worth it.

Walk through video

Tweasier – The Walk through video from Tweasier on Vimeo.

Pre-launch website checklist

Gary Hartley — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Successful websites require a series of important pre-launch stages to ensure they have the best chance of succeeding. Client liason, technical specs, design briefs, accessibility, standards compliance and SEO are all important factors in the DNA of the top performing sites. Through years of commercial experience we have found the final quality assurance stage to be one of the most important. This vital stage ensures both platform stability and quality is at it’s optimum pre-launch.

A pre-launch website checklist is a key tool and should be used religiously on every new website build. A useful online tool that seems to successfully identify all the key pre-launch points is Launchlist. Winner of ‘CSS Awards Site of the Day’, Launchlist offers a simple, user friendly online checklist for websites. You simply answer Yes or No to their questions and they say whether your site is ready to launch. You can even add your own points, useful if you have a additional QA’s. The service is currently FREE with a Pro service on the horizon.

A few sample check points

All text free from spelling errors?

Content has been placed consistently?

Page & Content formatting has been tested?

Print stylesheet exists and tested?

Meta data has been included and is appropriate?

Page titles are descriptive and SEO friendly?

Images have appropriate alt text?

Title attributes are appropriate and SEO friendly?

Favicon has been created and displays correctly?

Footer includes copyright and link to site creator?

HTML has passed validation? Check using the W3C HTML validation service

CSS has passed validation? Check using the W3C CSS validation service

There are no broken links?

And so on and so forth.

Visit Launchlist

HDR Photography Competition: Winners Announced!

Gary Hartley — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:53:46 +0000

We recently launched a competition aimed at photographers with a passion for HDR, with a prize fund of $500. We’re glad to announce the competition has closed and our friends at HDR Darkroom have picked the winners. The winning three HDR photos entered into our Flickr photo competition group will each win a copy of HDR Darkroom Pro. Two other licences will be awarded to 2 lucky people who have either Retweeted the competition on Twitter or who have commented on the competition post page. The winners are announced below.

Winners from the Flickr HDR photography group

Picked by the guys at HDR Darkroom from a total number of 119 entries by 53 photographers.

Winner!

Shot at the barbican centre in london, 5 frames HDR

Second Place

This is a 3 shot handheld HDR

Third Place

Late evening on Stanage Edge above Hathersage in Derbyshire with a lone para-glider hovering above the Edge trying to avoid the volcanic ash!

Other winners

Winning comment – Jonny Andrews

Winning Twitter follower – Worldobyrne