WordPress Portfolio Themes: Coming Soon

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…