In this post we release a yet another freebie: Academica WordPress Theme, a free WordPress theme designed specifically for educational websites such as universities, schools etc. It's a flexible and versatile free theme that can be easily customized and branded for any university, academy or non-profit organization. The theme is designed by ProudThemes and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. As usual, the theme is free to use in private and commerical projects.
Download the theme for free!
The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish.
- live demo
- large preview (.jpg, 0.6 Mb)
- download the theme (.zip, 0.12 Mb)
- download the .PSD Logo (.zip, 42Kb)
- release on the developer's site
If you want to be informed when an update to Academica theme will be released, consider signing up with ProudThemes (free).
Features
- The theme was developed for WordPress 3.0 (compatible with 3.0.1)
- Modern, three-column clean design
- Setting up Academica Theme is easy and takes just a few seconds. The theme can be uploaded directly from the
Dashboard > Appearance > Themespage. No need to edit any files — everything can be done from the Theme Options page. - 5 built-in icons to share and link to your profiles on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube
- The theme allows enabling/disabling of a jQuery-based content slider on the homepage for showing your photos
- Academica Theme uses a jQuery-based drop-down menu with a fade-in effect
- 9 sidebars (widget areas) and 3 custom widgets developed for this theme
- 3 custom page templates and 2 custom post templates
- Dynamic image resizing (TimThumb script)
- Support for Custom Menus (WordPress 3.0+).
Screenshots
Drop-down navigation menu. See live demo.
Content blocks in the sidebar, defined with a custom widget. See live demo.
News archive page. See live demo
Comments area with threaded comments ("reply"-functionality). See live demo.
Behind the design process
As always, here are some insights from the designers:
"Most theme developers create a lot of magazine and portfolio themes for WordPress, however the education niche is mostly ignored. We decided to do something about it, and create a flexible and versatile free theme that can be easily customized and branded for any university/academy or non-profit organization. Of course, the theme can be used in other niches as well, no restrictions or whatsoever. After reviewing a ton of web-sites of educational institutions, our eyes fell on the web-site of Massey University of New Zealand. With a rather general layout and color palette, we decided to make the navigation and all styling pure-CSS, without any gradients, so that the theme can be customized much faster and easier."
Thank you for your great work, guys. We appreciate your work, your time and your contributions to the design community.