Frugal Theme – Clean WordPress Themes

UPDATE – 3 February 2011: If you’re looking for Frugal Wordprss theme, I am glad to announce that Frugal theme is switched to Catalyst theme. Welcome to Catalyst. Read my full review.

Frugal Theme is came upon the Version 3.5 and now is more easy to install and operate as well. Read more

My Brief Story With Frugal Theme

Some month ago, I had a problem with my old three columns theme, which according to my stats many of the heavy use files were linked to it. So I decided to look into another theme more clean and simple, and I opted for the Frugal theme.

Frugal is a clean WordPress 3.0 theme. Since the early releases of WordPress 3.0, the Frugal Team has been constantly monitoring the WordPress Core Code to ensure that Frugal is fully compatible with all the fantastic new functionality. So, if you’re looking to upgrade the theme of your blog I surely reccomend Frugal too, because I use it on my blog and I can attest that is a great theme.

A Full Frugal Theme Review

Developed by my friend Eric Hamm Frugal is one of the best and complete WordPress magazine theme out there. Compatible with WordPress 3.0+ is a clean and fully customizable theme for those who don’t have any PHP or CSS knowledges.

In these months, I was looking the perfect theme for my main site The3dtechnologies. I’m already using two different theme in other of my two sites, Arthemia Theme on nickdeiana.com, and Thesis Theme on cabinrentalsideas.com.

Sure, they are two great theme, but I must admit that none of them has worked well with my site the3dtechnologies. Instead, Frugal has all features which I always wanted to have in one theme: faster page loads, simplicity, and a lot of widget availables, and Frugal theme presents all these features.

Frugal Theme is definitely a writer’s theme for its Georgia font for headings and Arial for body text. As you can see on my blog Text is black, and links are a nice dark blue. Also there’s enough whitespace for all your advertisers.

Here, is a short snippet from the Frugal website:

When it comes down to it, your blog’s content is MUCH more important that the theme itself. Sure, you don’t want your site to look tacky or amateurish or misrepresent the focus of your blog, but at the end of the day, it’s WHAT your saying that creates the draw for your potential subscribers, not what color the background is when they read it (though that can have an effect).

So in designing the frugal WordPress theme I kept in mind the idea of providing the absolute best possible framework to put ALL the focus on the words and images you provide your readers…no more, no less. In it’s stock form, the frugal theme is light and clear and perfect for the next great work you are about to share.

WordPress Theme Is Ideal For Google Caffeine: Google Caffeine Loves Frugal Theme

When it comes to choose a WordPress theme for the new Google Caffeine algorithm, than Frugal is the right choice.

Getting a theme with a clean code structure is very important today. The new Google algorithm, includes new ranking factors. If you want to get an high position on search results, the page speed should be most faster as possible.

Here, where Frugal comes into play. Frugal wp theme was developed to make your page load very quick. Compared to most of known theme out there, Frugal do not use images into its background, headers, navigation bars, and footers.

Also, you no need to install plugins to your blog like custom avatars and custom favicon, which create clutter and slowing your site. Frugal has these features integrated.

Watch this cool video below to see just how powerful this theme is.

Customize Your Layout And Design Without Touching Your Theme Files

One of the better aspect of Frugal is its minimalistic, clean design. However, first all, I reccomend this theme for those are creating their first blog. The reason is quite simple. Frugal is a theme for non-coder, so you have no need to learn php or css language. You can setting up the background color, font, and so on. Also, You can add a custom header, as well.

In this image below, you can see what you could setting directly from your wp control panel.

and that’s just the main content font options.

Speed Up Your WordPress Theme To Rank Better in Google

If there is one thing that weakens a blog is wait to watch every page load. A slow load time can depend from many factors. Usually, the main reasons a blog is slow are:

• Poorly made plugins.
• Slow web server.
• Too large images on your site.

Well, in this case Frugas will give a great help because is super speedy to load every page due uses ZERO images and a low number of plugin integrated.

Main Frugal Theme Features

Frugal has a lot of features. Some of the highlights includes:

1. Upload a custom logo – Frugal theme lets you to upload your own logo and adjust it. Once created a logo in a certain specified size, you can display it to your header.

2. 29 page guide – Frugal give you an useful user manual. It was wrote to help client to customize their theme.

3. Custom favicon – Another essential features is Frugal theme favicon. It let you create, then upload your favicon file into a specified directory in your Frugal theme. Once done, you can display your Favicon image in your URL into your browsers address bar.

4. Two 468×60 ad/feature widgets – One is located on the right side of the header, while the other is in between your posts main content and the comments section.

5. Custom avatar – Frugal lets you to add your own custom avatar image(80×80, but this can be adjusted to your liking) to sit to the left of the name of the comments of your blog without using additional plugin.

6. Threaded comments – This features allow you to reply to individual comments. It was included with the latest version of WordPress, but this does not work with all themes. So this theme has all necessary for threaded comments.

What’s Come With The Frugal Theme 3.5?

Rearrangable Admin Page Option Boxes: The same flexibility and power you’ve come to expect in the options of your Frugal-based sites has been brought home to the admin interface. Each box of option sets is now draggable & sortable, collapsible & expandable. You can organize your admin pages however you want, with your essential options always visible and at the top of the page.

Frugal Theme Admin Menu has moved ‘Above the Fold’: With 3.5, we’ve decided to carve some space out for ourselves between ‘Comments’ and ‘Appearance’ in the WordPress Admin Sidebar. Not only does this save users on lower-resolution screens from needing to scroll down to see the menu, but it’s a subtle way of demonstrating that, with this release of Frugal 3.5, we’re on our way to the top!

WordPress 3.0 Compatibility: We’ve done extensive testing to ensure that Frugal is ahead of the game and ready for the upcoming release of WordPress 3.0.

WordPress MU / 3.0 Multi-User Enabled: Another exciting aspect of WP 3.0 is that the WP Crew has folded WP-MU into Core. Frugal has worked with WP-MU for quite some time, but we’re pleased to see that this feature is going mainstream.

Refined image inputs: With Frugal 3.5, we’ve removed the need to type in the names of your uploaded images into the options pages by hand, and replaced the old textfields with drop-down menus showing all available images.

Here’s what Eric has to say to us about the new release:

The following video will go into detail

Price

One of the better thing about Frugal is that is free to download(default version). You can also choose to pass to the premium version that goes up to $79 for a single user license, while the developer license goes up to $199.

Of course, the premium version have more features then the free version. That justify the non-free price.

Final Conclusion

To make sure to be indexed by the new Google Caffeine algorithm, your web page structure must be clean as possible, so here where Frugal Theme come into play. This theme is a blessing for people who want that their pages will load quickly.

DOWNLOAD FRUGAL WORDPRESS THEME

Now, take a look ‘behind the scenes’ of the frugal Theme.

Note: I could not put all screenshot.

Admin Pages Settings/Uploads:

Frugal Main Options:

Frugal Feature Options:

FRUGAL THEME DOWNLOAD