Frogs of Borneo

frogsofborneo.org presents the frogs of the island of Borneo and their tadpoles: species by species, with basic biological information and pictures. The site is in English and is meant for a broad audience – from researchers and conservationists to anyone who loves nature.

We knew the site well: we had looked after it under a maintenance contract since 2016 – back then still on Joomla 3.

Over time the structure had reached its limits. In Joomla every frog was set up as a category of its own – not as an article. Long menu lists filled the right-hand side of the pages, and at the end of 2023 a module even had to be adjusted because some categories existed twice.

So in January 2024 we proposed modernising the site from the ground up. The goal: a reusable, consistent data structure for the frogs that makes the site easier to use and to maintain.

Instead of reworking the old site piece by piece, we set up frogsofborneo.org afresh on Joomla 5 – with YOOtheme Pro as the page builder and Advanced Custom Fields Pro for the fields. We created new menu items, categories and articles and took the content over from the old website.

The decisive step: frogs are no longer categories but articles within categories. They have a tailor-made input form built from custom fields, and Dynamic Content turns it into every species page in the same layout. Galleries, videos and single pictures can now be maintained without any HTML knowledge.

Navigation has become simpler too. The category views show the frogs with a preview picture and their name – open a family and you see straight away what it contains. The long menu lists on the right are no longer needed. We gave the look a discreet update; the photos of the frogs take centre stage.

The project put special weight on privacy: no external resources and just one technically necessary cookie. We created a new legal notice and privacy policy together with the client, using the eRecht24 agency package.

The site still keeps that promise today. Our measurement of the home page:

Measured on 9 October 2026: home page of frogsofborneo.org, one run without cache, before any consent, the same on phone and desktop. The fonts come from the site’s own server too.

A one-hour training session by phone or online introduced the new way of editing. And the structure holds: since May 2026 frogsofborneo.org has offered extended information on tadpoles – with an overview that can be filtered by family, type of water body, position in the water, feeding type and size.

A site in which every frog was a category of its own has become an orderly reference work: consistent species pages, families with preview pictures, editing without HTML – and a home page that needs no third-party servers. A foundation on which frogsofborneo.org can keep growing, species by species.