FrogsThemes.com Review

Looking for a new WordPress theme to use recently, we thought we’d review an up and coming theme site, FrogsThemes.com. Run by a professional design and development team, FrogsThemes claims to make cutting-edge themes with lots of perks. A browse of the site shows just four themes at the moment (although the quality looks high), and Pegasus Pro looked like it would do the job.

I wanted a lot of custom pages on my site along with social media widgets and a way to show off my best projects, so without needing the PSD files I opted for a Professional Licence, competitive at $48 (Full pricing info here).

One-Click Installer

We’d just read about the One-Click Installer on all of the FrogsThemes templates – it sounded pretty cool but did it actually save any time? Well, yes it did! Starting on a new site with a fresh install of WordPress, I just uploaded the theme zip file through the WordPress admin like normal, clicked “activate”, and this little beauty popped up:

Of course I chose “installing this theme on a brand new website”, I was impressed by the explanation and the warning before going ahead.

If you choose the other option “installing this theme on my existing site”, you get to pick and choose which bits of your old template to overwrite. Very clever.

Anyway, I clicked the green button and away it went.

What Does My Site Look Like Now?

The first thing I did was check my site to see exactly what the theme installer had done, and, well…it had done basically everything. The site was populated with menus, pages, widgets and dummy content. Not absolutely loads but enough to let you see the layout of the site and how everything worked. I can rename, delete, move or change everything but my little WordPress site looked like a proper working (and pretty professional) website.

Options Framework

The next innovation FrogsThemes offers is something they call the options framework. It’s meant to allow to easily customise your theme however you like, and it’s accessible via the “Theme Options” tab in your WordPress dashboard menu.

The fact that no coding whatsoever went into this fills me with joy. Not only could I do this, but any one of my writers could do this too.

What’s even better is that Pegasus Pro comes with a bucket load of page templates ready-made, so I just had to pick a few to get the sections on my site that I wanted. It was just a matter of swapping the dummy content for the options that I wanted. Again, no need for a developer to intervene, and it saved me a lot of time and effort.

FrogsThemes Support

In the interests of writing a full review, I thought I’d better try the FrogsThemes support. You have to be logged into FrogsThemes to open a support ticket (which makes sense), and I got a reply in a couple of hours from a nice chap called Nick:

FrogsThemes.com – The Verdict

FrogsThemes might not have as many themes as its larger rivals just yet, but Pegasus Pro is probably the most innovative and at the same time *easy* theme I’ve ever used. If the quality of this is anything to go by the rest are well worth the $48 licence, and for just $148 you get all the Photoshop files too.

I’ve never seen anything like the One-Click Installer before and I’d recommend it to anyone setting up a brand new WordPress site. It lets you see exactly how your site would look if you’re using all the bells and whistles – great for people who want their site to do a little more.

The Options Framework is also impressive – really simple and yet you can customise the whole look and feel of your site. It turns your WordPress Dashboard into a lot more – a whole design kit in one place.

According to the site, FrogsThemes have at least one more theme rolling out in the next couple of weeks (a blogging theme this time) and all we can say is Watch This Space.

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2 Responses to “FrogsThemes.com Review”

1. Lady Penelope says:

   September 23, 2011 at 1:12 pm

   Great review guys.
   I too have tried the FrogsThemes 1-click install and it worked a treat. Nice that someone has finally thought about doing this, simplifying the WordPress installation process even further. The options framework is a great addition.
   Definitely recommended.
2. BUBS UK says:

   November 7, 2011 at 6:06 pm

   We just used one of their themes on a new portal we’re creating. Does exactly what it says on the tin. They just need more themes, really. Would be great if other premium themes were as straight forward as theirs.