UPDATE – 30 December 2010 - Before to read this post: Frugal theme is switched to Catalyst theme. Welcome to Catalyst.Read my full review.
Some days ago, I received a Facebook message from my friend Sarie which asked me the following question:
“Hi Nicola, what is the difference between Frugal and Thesis theme? Thesis or Frugal, which is better?”
To help Sarie remove any doubt, I throught to put down a detailed review of both themes due to compare their features.
Before to enter into the main discussion about the difference between Frugal and Thesis theme I want to tell a few things. I do not received a free copy of Frugal and Thesis. I read about their features, liked them, bought them. Currently, I’m using Frugal on my main site the3dtechnologies and Thesis on my second site cabinrentalsideas.com.
First at all, I purchased a developers license for both themes. The reason is simple…..in this way I can Install both themes in all of my websites, and use them for commercial purposes as well.
Thesis Vs Frugal WordPress Theme, Who Is The Winner?
First at all, I choosed both themes for my sites because are the two best customizable themes for WordPress I’ve ever seen.
If you visit my site cabinrentalsideas.com, the top of the page has integrated a cool Multimedia Box, which allows me to rotate pictures, embed video, or even include custom code for all those readers that want to show advertising in that area.
This features make Thesis different by other themes out there. Also you can change what appears in that area on a page by page basis if I want to. For instance, if you go on my homepage you’ll notice that my cabinrentalsideas homepage, the box includes pictures that change once you load the page, while the other single pages have an Youtube video.
Both themes allows you almost every aspect of adjustment for your fonts: type, size, weight, color, link hover color, link color, alignment, line-height and letter-spacing, all without ever having to touch a drop of css code in the WordPress templates. Of course, there is a custom.css file that allows you to edit further if you wish although most Frugal and Thesis users will find themselves doing the majority of their customizations in the options panel.
For instance, in this image below, you can see what you could setting directly from your Frugal control panel.
Thesis’s and Frugal are both great for creating SEO friendly pages. They allows your website to improve in SEO. In a nutshell you have:
- SEO title tag
- Permalink redirect
- RSS footer
- Robots meta
- WordPress breadcrumbs
- Custom query string
- SEO slugs
Both themes present many different hooks to let the users to add custom content. Also,to monitor your site they can allows you to insert your Google Analytics tracking code… all right from the control panel.
Whatch Frugal Theme video
[HTML1]
Here, the Thesis Theme video
[HTML2]
While Frugal provides you different layout options such as: Sidebar left, sidebar right, double sidebar and no sidebar Thesis let you create different type of layout. If you want to add your logo and personalize it, they allows you to do it as well.
Also, both themes offer page templates that give you all the flexibility you need to grow with your WordPress website.
Conclusion
Tough answer and it depends on your own use. If your site is full of content, then Thesis is the right choice because is wonderfully organized. But if you want an extremely clean and simple theme and need space for advertisements Frugal is by far the best. Take a look my advertising page to show how many space you have with Frugal. Consider that these black areas in the image are only private ad space, while the other space run with buysellads. So you have a lot of space with Frugal.
You can get more information about Thesis or Frugal by clicking on those links.
Important:
Frugal team are planning to updating their theme to a new cool version, called “Catalyst”. They will give every single person who owns Frugal access to Catalyst for free.
So if you buy a copy of Frugal now you will be upgraded to Catalyst when it comes out and receive the awesome features that will come with Catalyst.
