Frog's Digital Design Blog » wordpress

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 →

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.

First 7 days of FrogsThemes.com – a massive success

Gary Hartley — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:37:41 +0000

Well it’s been a whole week since we launched FrogsThemes.com, and we’ve been blown away with the popularity, both through direct feedback and the levels of traffic. We celebrated the launch by giving away FolioGrid, WordPress portfolio theme, and have been amazed to find that the theme has already been downloaded over 500 times.

The snowball effect

CSSMania.com started the hype by featuring FrogsThemes.com in their showcase. What followed that was a snowball effect where dozens of sites in different niches blogged about us. Giving away FolioGrid for free really has excited people. Many WordPress theme directories have also added FolioGrid and generated dozens of downloads each.

A few stats

Just to emphasise the impact for giving something of quality away for free, here are some quick stats.

FolioGrid Portfolios

We’ve already seen a few portfolios popup using FolioGrid. Creatives have demonstrated FolioGrid is a versatile portfolio template by molding it around their work. We’ve seen portfolios showcasing logo design, photography, digital art and even pottery, with the artist adding Paypal options and turning FolioGrid into an online shop.

A summary of gains

It’s amazing to think that a new site could become so immediately popular so quickly. Without doubt the catalyst for success has originated from the giveaway of FolioGrid. Besides from the traffic and download levels, FrogsThemes has benefited from over 200 confirmed newsletter subscriptions in the first week, more than the total gained in the entire first year of this blog. By going viral through social media, blogs and even word of mouth, FrogsThemes.com now has an awareness that far outreaches our initial estimates. The life blood of any site is the links it gains. By choosing to give FolioGrid away we inadvertently created a linkbait campaign that has helped us gain much needed authority from much bigger and established domains. Over time we also expect to see benefit in having a link back from every FolioGrid portfolio, which was part of the CC licence. Now if there was ever an argument against giving away things then this is surely a case study for!

In summary

An amazing first week for FrogsThemes.com, fingers crossed the success continues…

FREE WordPress Portfolio theme giveaway!

Gary Hartley — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:23:39 +0000

Designers rejoice and huddle together for the unveiling of our latest addition to the Floating Frog family. We’re extremely proud and excited to announce the arrival of FrogsThemes.com, a new website dedicated to providing all a creative needs to create their online portfolio. FrogsThemes.com will primarily be focusing on creating professional looking Portfolio WordPress Themes and HTML templates. We’ll also be showcasing the best portfolio templates on the web and bringing them into the limelight on FrogsThemes.com. We’ll also be offering helpful articles, how-to guides, best practices and tutorials to those creatives wishing to create their own portfolio from scratch.

The grand launch and opening giveaway!

To celebrate all the hard work that’s been put into FrogsThemes.com, we’re giving away (some say foolishly) an amazingly designed WordPress Portfolio Theme called FolioGrid. Designed specific to fit purpose, FolioGrid is a new breed of WordPress Theme. 3 colour schemes and packaged with advanced automatic features, FolioGrid aims to be a dynamic blank canvas for any creative to build upon. Painters can showcase their artwork, install a ecommerce plugin and sell online. A web designer may want to reskin FolioGrid but use the sophisticated grid based jQuery layout and automatic thumb generation to create their own unique online portfolio and finally Joe doe, with no programming or WordPress experience may just want to use as is. Anything is possible with FolioGrid and we’re over the moon to be in a position where we can give it away, into the online creative community and lift the professional bar on online portfolios.

Welcome FrogsThemes.com

The new place to be seen and heard.

FolioGrid: Grab it while it’s hot!

A FREE WordPress Portfolio Theme

Summary: WordPress Portfolio Theme, 3 colour schemes, built with love.

Features at a glance:

Fluid jQuery grid-based dynamic layout and transitions
Auto sizing thumbs
Comment avatar enabled
Multiple page templates
Widget enabled
SEO friendly
Pure CSS based layout
Easy to reskin, all three themes contain no template images, all styling is done through the CSS file
No complicated and restrictive custom fields to handle
Low file size, ultra quick loading
Cross browser tested, even IE6 displays a neat looking portfolio
Ideal for all types of portfolio, FolioGrid is a creatives blank canvas

More information on FolioGrid

FREE download

Licence: Free to use with a link back to Frogsthemes.com. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Feedback

Let us know what you think! Over the coming weeks FrogsThemes.com will be launching a Hall of Fame where users of FolioGrid can show off their portfolio of work and theme customisations.

WordPress Portfolio Themes: Coming Soon

Gary Hartley — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 23:38:29 +0000

A new dawn for The Floating Frog

I thought I’d take this opportunity to announce the pending arrival of some WordPress themes I’ve been working on. Over the coming days, weeks, months, The Floating Frog will be shifting dramatically from it’s current position, from a leading UK based digital design blog to a portal where designers can drop in and access the tools they need designed specifically for them. I will tell more at a later date once things are in motion but until then I’d like to put a flavour of this out there now.

Calling all designers

It’s fair to say most designers aren’t developers and building their own website can be some what restricting. The design I’m sure is brilliant but to convert that into a website with full CMS capabilities will either cost them money, time, headaches or even all three. Using an open source CMS like WordPress is an ideal way of tackling the management side of the site but this doesn’t answer the frontend dilemma. Unfortunately I haven’t found any WordPress Portfolio Themes that I think are good enough to use to showcase my work. They never seem to tick all my boxes. Also with it running on WordPress, theme developers feel it necessary to add in all the features WordPress offers. The portfolio part of the theme can be buried within the navigation on it’s own section with maybe a homepage show reel demoing the latest work. The rest of the homepage is filled with blog rolls, blog articles, navigation, twitter feeds and so on. This is why I decided to design and develop a WordPress Portfolio Theme specifically targeted at showcasing the work of the creative community.

A WordPress theme for creatives

Coming soon is a theme called FolioGrid, a WordPress theme designed for creatives to showcase their work in a grid/gallery based format. The theme will be completely fluid, allowing every part of a browsers screen to be filled with their work. The beauty of the layout is that the emphasis is on the work, not the design of the theme. No fancy background images or rotating banners, just a clean content focused canvas for the work to flow on. Several colour variations will be made available, for example a white theme, a dark theme, a yellow theme and so on.

Feedback wanted

It would be great to hear your thoughts on this, does it sound right for you? How much would you be willing to pay for a ready to use online portfolio with full CMS? Any other thoughts…

Free Images For Your Blog

Gary Hartley — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:30:32 +0000

Today Crestock photo have released a WordPress plugin that they claim allows users to add images to their posts for free, all from the sidebar when creating a post. We haven’t tested the plugin so we’d love to hear your feedback if you install it.

How does it work?

The plugin uses Crestock’s existing search algorithm, so the search results – and images – are the same as on Crestock.com.

After doing an image search, you’re presented with the search results. To add the images to your post simply drag & drop, in the position where you want the image.

You also get access to most of the advanced filtering options on Crestock.com with a single click, for example:

Number of images per page
Image Orientation
File type
Pagination

Where can I get it?

The plugin can be downloaded from Freebie Images.com – the Plugin home page.

Quick Installation Guide:

Download and extract Zip file on your computer
Upload the “freebie-images-free-stock-images-plugin” folder to “/wp-content/plugins/” directory
Activate plugin in WP Admin plugin panel
blog away

Wapple mobile plugin for WordPress

Gary Hartley — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:30:02 +0000

This is a guest post by Wapple in response to an alternative mobile WordPress plugin to WPtouch. Let us know your thoughts about Wapple and WPtouch in the comments below.

There has been a lot of talk lately about mobile plugins for WordPress – there are plugins that make your blog look and work like an iPhone, ones that make it work on Windows Mobile devices and a range of others that are somewhere in-between.

But until recently there haven’t been any mobile plugins available that make your blog work on every handset as well as making it look amazing to every visitor.

I say until recently because there is now a viable alternative to the mobile plugins that have been around for a while and it’s called the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress.

Screenshots

The acid test of how good it is is to show some blogs with the mobile plugin activated. You can see in the first screenshot below how it looks on different phones, a Nokia N95, a Nokia E71 and an iPhone respectively. The second screenshot shows a comparison between the web and mobile site – you can see that they both compare pretty favourably!

Why it’s different to other mobile plugins

The first major advantage the Wapple Architect plugin has over any other mobile plugins is the number of devices it supports. It can tailor to old WML or CHTML capable handsets as well as brand new ones that support almost as much as a web browser. It uses advanced web services from Wapple to do device detection and it does it to a very high level.

Another huge plus it has is that it retains the installed theme from web to mobile. Colours are maintained and you get the option to upload a specific mobile logo which means you can retain your brand identity perfectly across platforms. And because of the way the plugin is written, that mobile logo will dynamically resize perfectly on the fly to fit any handset no matter what its dimensions are.

You have full control over every aspect of the CSS on the mobile site so you can make any changes to how your site looks – from changing the size of post headers to adding a extra little bit of padding in the navigation menu. You get a couple of stylesheets, pre-populated with the styles you’d need to edit so it really is a case of finding the style you want to change and making a few edits. How good you make your mobile plugin look is really up to you!

In addition, you have the ability to change a whole stack of options. You can allow visitors on mobile to make comments, show the post excerpt on the homepage, show thumbnails on the home page or even build the home page in a slightly different way so that you show selected category posts rather than the latest ones!

Using the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin also means your mobile site scores higher on both the readymobi compatibility test and the W3C mobileOK check than other mobile plugins around. For readymobi, most of the time you’ll score a 5/5 and for W3C, a score of over 90/100 is the norm.

There are dozens and dozens more options – you really get to specify exactly how you want your mobile site to look and function.

How to install

It’s really easy to install either way you want to do it. You can download it and put it in your /wp-content/plugins folder, or install it through the WordPress control panel. Even for a WordPress newbie it shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes.

After you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you’ll need to get yourself a free dev key from Wapple in order to authenticate your blog. Head over to the signup page and get yourself one, it only takes a minute and once it’s made its way to your inbox, enter it in the Wapple Architect Basic Settings page to mobilize your WordPress blog!

There are plenty of other resources about this plugin – check out the home page on wordpress.org or it’s home page at Mobile Web Junkie. Finally, here is another screenshot of how the mobile version compares to the web version on Mobile Web Junkie, you can see how the brand identity is completely retained.

WPtouch – A WordPress mobile theme plugin

Gary Hartley — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 07:00:23 +0000

WPtouch is a brilliant little WordPress plugin. With a single click, WPtouch transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android or BlackBerry touch mobile device.

Screenshots of WPtouch plugin for WordPress

The admin panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your site to your iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini mobile, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm visitors without modifying a single bit of code (or affecting) your regular desktop theme.

The theme also includes the ability for your visitors to easily switch between the WPtouch view and your site’s regular theme.

WPtouch vs standard theme – loading times

This special plugin has been specially designed to speed up browsing times on mobile devices, whether it’s over 3G or Wifi…

WPtouch is fully customisable

A feature packed admin console allows complete customisation to the appearance of WPtouch.

Download stats for WPtouch plugin

The popularity has shot up recently for the WPtouch plugin.

Try it yourself

If you have a touch screen mobile device why not visit us on it. WPtouch is active on The Floating Frog so you can fully test the plugin out before decided whether or not it’s right for you.

Download it

2.6

Download, unzip, and upload the ‘wptouch’ folder and all its contents to your WordPress wp-content/plugins folder using FTP. Visit the plugin tab in the WordPress admin, and activate WPtouch. You can then setup your plugin options by visiting the Settings – >WPtouch tab.

2.7+

You can now install WPtouch directly from the WordPress admin!
WordPress MU

If you’d like to use WPtouch with WordPress MU as a site-wide plugin, simple install the wptouch folder in the mu-plugins directory. Once complete, either move wptouch.php back a directory (into the mu-plugins directory), or create a symbolic link to it.

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Smush.it for WordPress – Optimise your images for a lightening quick website

Gary Hartley — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:29:49 +0000

Smush.it is an image optimiser developed by Yahoo! that lets you decrease image file sizes without losing image quality. If you’re running WordPress, there is a plugin that’s optimises images on the fly when you upload them. WP Smush.it takes just moments to install and can make a big impact on the performance of your website.

How does it work?

Every image you add to a page or post will be automatically run through Smush.it behind the scenes. You don’t have to do anything different.

N. B. In some cases GIFs should be replaced with PNG files. You can control this behaviour on the Options page. It is off by default.

Smush.it vs PunyPNG

We use Smush.it because it comes in an easy to use WordPress plugin that optimises images uploaded. PunyPNG however compared their compression engine against Smush.it in a recent test and achieved a 41% compression rate, while Smush.it only achieved 14%. So if you want to optimise the websites main template images it would be worth checking out PunyPNG as well as Smush.it.

Other image optimisation tools

There are many image optimisation tools available, here are just a few:

WordPress Theme Opinions Needed

Gary Hartley — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:15:01 +0000

WordPress is without doubt a powerful blogging platform and more recently it’s being used more commonly as a Content Management System. Amongst some of the big brands using WordPress include Sony, Ford, Wall Street Journal, Samsung, Playstation and a whole heap of others.

Currently there is an abundance of WordPress Blog Themes to choose from and setting up your own blog can be achieved in a lunch hour. What there isn’t a abundance of are WordPress Themes targeted at businesses who want more than just a blog. Even those themes that are never seem to tick all the boxes on what a business really need, so this is what I need some feedback on. I’m planning on creating some nice, simple themes targeted at SME’s to get them online with the features and control they need.

What do you want?

Theme

Business WordPress Theme
Personal WordPress Theme
Government WordPress Theme
Kids WordPress Theme
Personal Portfolio WordPress Theme
Blog WordPress Theme
E-Commerce
Photography WordPress Theme

Background

Dark Background WordPress Theme
Light Background WordPress Theme

Price

Would you pay a small fee? Would you rather it was FREE?

Please Give Your Feedback Below

Once I gage demand I’ll get cracking. Please leave your thoughts below with any links you think would be useful. Also any features or plugins you’d like to be incorporated.