The new year brings new opportunities, and if you’re looking to improve your site in 2014 then the first thing you need to ensure is that it’s responsive. Unfortunately responsive sites can be hard to build from scratch, which is why we’re delighted our sister-site, MightyDeals.com, has been able to arrange a huge discount on this professional HTML5 responsive template.

Arctic is a massive template, with more than 20 custom pages, numerous sliders, and tons of cool tools and widgets. What’s more, Arctic comes with 4 well organized PSD files; meaning you can not only tweak the code but revise the design however you like.

There are multiple home page designs to choose from, portfolio pages, blog designs, even sitemaps and error pages.

Arctic is built on a responsive grid system, delivering amazing looks to just about every device on the market, and some that aren’t even available yet.

Two different styles are included, dark and light, so you can choose your favorite or use one as the starting point for your own design.

What’s more, to really drive you on to success this year, Arctic includes amazing interactive and social media features; there’s a working PHP contact form, MailChimp integration, Google Maps API integration, Twitter integration, Flickr integration and Facebook integration. Whether you’re updating your own site or working on a client’s Arctic is a phenominal place to start.

Arctic normally retails at $17, but for a limited time you can download this great HTML5 template with all its assets included, for just $9, that’s a 47% discount! Head over to MightyDeals to grab this offer right now.

Have you used Arctic for a project? Which of its features is your favorite? Let us know in the comments.

Video Course: The Freelance Formula – only $37!

Last year, WordPress was being used to power 72.4 million websites on the Internet. That was around half of all live sites at the time. Of all the websites using a content management system now, 59.8% of them are being run using WordPress. And their market share is continuing to grow! These are crazy stats for one of the greatest and simplest content management systems I’ve ever used.

WordPress is increasingly popular because literally anyone can use it. It started off merely as a blogging platform but has really evolved into a magnificent content management system. It comes with some of the best plugins and contributors make some great plugins to go along with it. You can create your own social network with WordPress. You can create your own web stores, affiliate programs, streaming sites and so much more. And even if you don’t want something as robust, you can create your own piece of the web with WordPress.

Of major importance is how you dress your WordPress. As you may know, you can download themes made specifically for WordPress that will give you the look you desire. It can be a portfolio, a shop, a photo site — it can all be done with WordPress. There are tons of sites out there that make these themes. Today, we’ve got a little guide to get you started with the places you can find and download or purchase some amazing themes.

Free

FThemes

The greatest selling point of FThemes is that all their WordPress themes are responsive. They have over 400 free themes, all of which are solid for those of us beginning with WordPress. Some digging will allow you to find a good variety of themes, all of which have some good features that easily editable. 

SiteGround

SiteGround is a web hosting company that offers a few WordPress themes. They aren’t mind-blowing beautiful themes, but they are great for the beginnings of a blog.

Site5 Themes

Site5 Themes are my personal favorite free themes. Site5 is a WordPress hosting site, so in an attempt to promote themselves they make some of the best WordPress themes. Their themes are easily editable with lots of custom features and are also organized really well for those who are familiar with editing code. Site5 is definitely a must-see if you are looking for free WordPress themes.

Web2Feel

Web2Feel is more of an aggregate site with lots of free themes. As you see, they show a bunch of FabThemes, but if you continue to scroll through their library, there are other themes available. Web2Feel tries to put a bunch of free themes in one convenient place.

Rock-Kitty

At first glance, you’d think Rock-kitty would have themes that aren’t that great, but after some real digging, you’ll find out these are some pretty solid themes. They don’t come with tons of features, but are created to welcome any other widgets and extensions you want to add.

FreeThemeLayouts

FreeThemeLayouts is what you’d normally look to get when searching for free WordPress themes on Google. They don’t have a ton of high quality things, but they do have some basic themes that could work based on the industry and purpose of the site.

SM Themes

All of the themes over at SM Themes are free, however, you do have the option to purchase an upgradeable license. If you get the free download, it’s basically for personal use and has a couple sponsored links in the code. If you are savvy enough, the links won’t matter too much to you. The themes are still on the generic side, however, the features in the backend make it something worth looking past. These are great themes to build upon if you know how.

WordPress.org

WordPress supports their users by creating a community for them. In this community, you can download plugins, other extensions as well as themes. This is one of the better places to find WordPress themes, especially ones with a great look to them. There’s a ton of different people who contribute to these things which means there’s much variety to be seen.

FabThemes

FabThemes is where you go if you need a relatively simple and generic layout. While they have different styles, they all seem to be typical of the style (i.e., portfolios, business pages, etc.). They are nicely designed and seem to be easy to make small changes to, however they’re not overly robust.

ZebraThemes

Don’t be alarmed when you go to download a free theme at Zebra Themes. They have a “Purchase” button for anyone who wants to buy an extended license which comes with added support. The free version obviously does not, but these themes are great if you need a basic fix. They are also responsive, have some custom widgets, shortcodes and more.

Free + Premium

WooThemes

WooThemes has been around for a while now and has really made a claim to fame with their WooCommerce extension. They have mainly premium themes, but a few of them are available for free download. All themes include the WooFramework which makes it very easy to make changes. Premium themes are available starting at $99. You can also join the Theme Club with access to all themes for as low as $29/month.

WPZoom

WPZoom is much like WooThemes where they have free and premium themes. WPZoom basically makes all their themes with the WPZoom Framework, which also claims easy customizations. Their premium themes start at a $75 license, with subscriptions starting at $19/month.

Yithemes

Yith is somewhat like some of the free websites we’ve seen that offer free and premium licenses for each theme. The difference with Yith is they have extensively better features for their premium themes. The free versions are just the theme with very little customizations, while the premium themes have lots of features such as extra color schemes, Google fonts, frameworks and much more. Their themes start at $59.

Wpshower

Wpshower takes pride in creating some of the cleanest, simplest themes available. They don’t overadvertise the fact they have free themes available, so you do have to take a look at all of them to find out which ones are free and which are premium. The selling point of their themes is the wonderful design of each one.

Moon Themes

Moon Themes is the place to shop if you are on a budget. They have a good balance of free and premium themes, all of which are fantastic and look great. Best of all, their premium themes start at $5 and have some very comparable features to themes that sell for more.

Towfiqi

Towfiqi has created free and premium themes that come in lite and pro versions. This is great if you just want to try something out and purchase it later for the premium features. These premium features include more color schemes, fonts, and more.

WPExplorer

These people over at WPExplorer have put together a really great brand of all things WordPress. They have free themes that you have to register to download, but you can also purchase them for $25 and they’ll come with free support. They sell their premium themes on some popular marketplaces (which we’ll go over below), so their prices vary, but start around $45.

Premium

Themezilla

Themezilla is one of my favorite places to purchase themes because they come from one of my favorite designers, Orman Clark. He’s got quite the eye for design and creates themes that are beyond easy to customize. They also come with some great features like ad management, a variety of page types and so much more. Their themes start at $59 for a single license and $199 for an entire year.

Kriesi.at

Kriesi claims they don’t just make WordPress themes, they’re designing the user experience for you and your customer. That’s a bold claim, but they seem to back it up with some really great themes that seem to solve solutions while looking good. Themes begin around $45.

MOJO Themes

MOJO Themes is an open marketplace that allows WordPress designers and developers sell their themes to buyers. It’s easy to browse through different styles of themes to find what you’re looking for. The price for themes at MOJO vary, but start around $49 for full themes and as low as $16 for things such as countdown pages.

Templatic

Templatic has created a niche in making themes with a specific purpose. While most developers make generic or one-size-fits-all themes, they’ve found out some of the reasons people need themes. If you have a very specific need, I’d recommend checking out Templatic first. Their themes start at $39 for a single license and a theme club for $299.

ThemeForest

If you have not heard about ThemeForest, then you’re in for quite a treat. ThemeForest is another popular marketplace where different people sell different types of themes. This is a great site if you are looking for a theme and just need to scroll through a bunch of ideas. ThemeForest sets the prices but they typically begin around $35 or $40. The more expensive they are, the more features they have.

Creative Market

Creative Market is another marketplace just like ThemeForest that offers many different types of themes from different authors. Creative Market is a bit cheaper than the former marketplace, starting some themes as low as $25.

Themify

Themify has created an astounding framework that allows you to drag and drop your changes into a Themify theme. For anyone of any level, this is an amazing feature for their themes. Even if you do not want a theme, you can purchase the Drag and Drop Builder plugin for $39, which is the same price as most themes at Themify.

Graph Paper Press

Graph Paper Press creates themes specifically for photographers, artists, bloggers and entrepreneurs. They’re very creative portfolio themes that are easily customizable and help individuals create a brand and build their business. Their theme subscription starts at $125 for the year or $299 for life. Single licenses start at $75.

ThemeFuse

ThemeFuse creates wonderful themes for businesses that are out of the box with great support and lots of customization options. ThemeFuse has single licenses affordably starting at $49, but also has a subscription option for $17/month.

Subscription only

Press 75

Press75 is a subscription based WordPress theme site that allows you access to all of their current and forthcoming themes. Their themes are pretty solid, clean and simple to understand. They have a yearly subscription at $75 and a lifetime for $275. 

Elegant Themes

The people over at Elegant Themes seem to really take time when creating their themes. They are wonderful crafted and come at an affordable price of $39 for all themes. They also have subscriptions available that include plugins for their themes.

Strictly WP

They seem to be a newer group of developers, as there are only a handful of themes. However, they offer a very affordable option for all of their themes. Subscriptions start at $9 a year. Their themes are absolutely usable and come with features such as being responsive, custom styling options and social media integration. 

Conclusion

Where you decide to get your themes is obviously going to be based on your needs and how you operate as a designer. Some of us can get one solid theme and edit that for different websites and uses. Others need to have access to several themes in order to make several different websites.

Do you use WordPress themes or build your own? Where do you like to source your WordPress themes? Let us know in the comments.

Video Course: The Freelance Formula – only $37!

GROUP HUG! It's that time of year I give ya'll the biggest warmest THANKS I can. CSS-Tricks is the foundation of my career and makes my life possible. And thus it is to you, dear reader, that I owe everything.

As we've done in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012, we'll look at the year by the numbers, milestones, and goals.

Statistics

Traffic wise, there were 65 million pageviews. That's a 22% rise over last year, but the growth rate was 38% last year so the rate of growth has slowed. This was from 16.5 million visits. I feel like unique visitors is kinda useless on a developer site. Unique visitors is cookie-based and web developers are the most likely people in world to mess with cookies, use different browsers, etc.

There were very few big spikes in which to mine for information on what makes for a big-traffic day. That's my style anyway: growth through stubborn persistence.

Mobile (i.e. non-desktop) traffic doubled. Although to just 6% from 3% last year. Again, understandably low for a developer site that most people come to when writing code, which is still a desktop-y activity. But the growth rate matches the web at large.

Social media dominated the referrals. The top four social (and top) sources: 1) Twitter (6% of all traffic) 2) StumbleUpon 3) Reddit 4) Facebook. The top four (so happened to be the next four) non-social-media referrals were: 1) Stack Overflow 2) Codrops 3) Smashing Magazine 4) David Walsh.

RSS subscribers plummeted from 100k last year to 30k this year, directly related to Google Reader shutting down, which still makes me sad. I'm using Feedly which I'm pretty happy with despite some weird missteps. I don't put much stock in Feedburner stats anymore though, as it's clearly an abandoned project. If FeedBurner shuts down, I'll probably move RSS back in-house and figure out some analytics for it I can trust.

There were 11,000 comments this year from the 65,300 ever posted on this site. That's 1/6 of them, and the site has been around 6 years, so that's kinda fun.

I received 2,500 emails from the contact form on this site, down from 3,000 last year. Maybe being chatty on social media is bringing that down? Interesting to see incoming email go down like that, especially with general traffic being up. I still think email is a great system and don't have any particular problems managing it.

I only did 13 free videos this year, about half of what I wanted to do, but at least that's better than one a month.

I wrote 278 posts this year. 171 one of them were regular length articles (almost one every other day) and 107 were link posts (usually accompanied by minimal commentary).

Milestones

I got the Store moved over to Shopify, which made for a real shopping cart system, easier fullfillment, and a generally better and more flexible system.

I got the Forums moved over to bbPress, which feels great to have more of the site under one roof. I'm still very happy with the move. Shoutout to all the moderators who help on the forums and keep it a clean, useful place.

I (along with the help of several contributors) finished the Alamanc. There is more that can be done there though in fleshing it out more and updating content, so if you enjoy very specific web tech writing and could use a little freelance work, get in touch.

I published two new complete courses in the Lodge. One on building a mobile-first artist's website in WordPress and one on learning jQuery from scratch.

I wrote once a month all year for The Pastry Box Project. My favorites were my post about introversion, working in public, and UX, although I enjoyed writing them all. I also wrote on 24 Ways this year about Grunt.

My favorite posts here on CSS-Tricks are the ones that are indicative of important sea changes in front end:

• Using SVG - SVG is amazing and front end developers should be comfortable using it.
• Andrey Sitnik's: Autoprefixer: A Postprocessor for Dealing with Vendor Prefixes in the Best Possible Way - It's really the way to go to handle prefixes.
• A Complete Guide to Flexbox - If 2014 isn't the Year of Flexbox, 2015 will be.
• Rob Dodson's A Guide to Web Components - Another thing that is going to be mega important on the web.

I spoke at Webstock early in the year which took me to New Zealand. I had a grand time. The only other time I left the United States was to visit Scotland for fun with friends. I did a fair bit of traveling around the US the rest of the year, mostly for conferences.

On the personal side, I lost a good bit of weight this year but I have a long way to go to be at an actually healthy weight. I really need to get on track again after these blasted holidays. I also moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin this year in April, which was also symbolic of a move into full-time CodePen work.

Goal Review

Grow traffic on this site.

While the rate of growth slowed, I'm happy with a traffic increase of 22%. If that happened again in 2014 I'd be just as happy.

Average one free screencast every two weeks.

Nope, only did about half that. I'm not overly upset about the rate though. If I do 12 in 2014 I'll call that good. I really like doing them, but I think creating more content for The Lodge is more important.

Release at least one new complete series to The Lodge. Hopefully in the first third of the year.

Did it! Two courses, actually. I'd like to do at least one more in 2014 too. I think a course straight up on CSS is a possibility, but I have several ideas. I actually have a couple of bigish ideas that could theoretically be books, but I don't think I want to make a book a specific goal.

Keep growing and expanding CodePen. We have a huge internal list of things we want to do and I'd like to see everything on that list (as of now) done.

I wish I could look at what that list exactly was. I bet we did the vast majority of it but not every bit of it. I can think of at least one thing that I bet was on it that we haven't gotten to but will in 2014. I'm going to give this a check though. We did pretty well. My biggest 2014 goals will all be CodePen related.

Keep on keeping on at ShopTalk releasing a new show every week.

Pretty close! I'm giving it a check because the only weeks we took off we discussed and decided to on purpose. Not because we failed to get it done.

Be a better web community member all around, participating in more discussions on this site and elsewhere, and bringing more community to CodePen.

This is hard to measure but I think I did OK. Probably about as much as I ever have done. I like it as a goal though. This year I don't want to limit it to where I'm being a good community member, I just want to think of it as one big web community.

New Goals

Professionally, I'm more and more happy that I've trimmed down my responsibilities to just CSS-Tricks, CodePen, and ShopTalk. So my rather generic set of goals around those are:

1. Continue my pace of writing here on CSS-Tricks. Don't ever be afraid to write about very small ideas. I'm also going to release an iterative new design here on CSS-Tricks. I have some simple ideas already so I'd like to see that out by Summer at the latest.
2. Continue building CodePen. That means adding features large and small, but just as importantly, refining what is there. I'd like to see us have four major releases this year and I'd really love to see us take on at least one new employee.
3. Continue to record and release episodes of ShopTalk all year with Dave and guests. I'd like to do 50 shows, keeping us a reliably-weekly show. I'd also like to solicit some serious listener feedback this year and make adjustments based on what they think would make for a better show.

I also need to create a new talk for 2014, and my generic goal for that is make it a talk that I really enjoy giving. I need to watch it on going to conferences. While I love them, the lost time can wear on me. I'm not going to set a goal on them. I know I felt I did too many last year and have lightened it up this year so far. If I feel better about it this year, I'll keep it the same. If I still feel like it was too many. I'll count them and do it by the numbers next year.

Personally, I'd like to:

1. Get down to 210lbs.
2. Organize my finances better. Have a system that separates all the things I do more clearly.
3. Save enough money so that in about 18 months I'll have a decent down payment on the actual loan I'll need to get when my land contract on my house is up.

Here we go

I hope you all had a good 2013, but much more importantly, I hope we all have an amazing 2014!

Thank You (2013 Edition) is a post from CSS-Tricks

In his year-end op-ed in The Baltimore Sun for 2013, political science professor Thomas Schaller looks back 100 years to New Year’s Day 1914. Throughout the column, Schaller recounts what the political landscape looked like when the country hadn’t yet fought two major wars and the federal income tax was only a year old. The year 1914 also included election changes with the first round of senators elected by popular vote.

Schaller notes he normally writes about highlights and major happenings in Maryland or national politics and culture, but wrote his year-end column “Reflect on, don’t fetishize, the past” to argue obsessing over the political past can be a perilous exercise.

“Reflecting upon the past can be a useful thought experiment,” Schaller writes. “Fetishizing the past — and presuming that somehow our country was better when it was simpler or less democratic — is dangerous business. On New Year’s Day, as ever, it’s best to turn our sights in the only direction that matters: toward the future.”

You can read the full op-ed in The Baltimore Sun here.