3 Fantastic WordPress Magazine Themes: Get the Right Magazine Theme for Your Website

The right premium WordPress magazine theme can create a fantastic website very quickly.

The point of using a WordPress theme is it saves you a bundle of time and/or money to create a great-looking website with a ton of content.

Sure, you might do some customization with graphics and layout, but at the end of the day... you can actually have a website up and running. I love building great websites fast.

The question is, which WordPress magazine themes are the best?

Many people look for a free magazine theme. This article explains the hazards of saving a few dollars with a free theme.


In my view, the best WordPress Magazine themes are:

1. Magazine child theme by StudioPress.
2. Lifestyle child theme by StudioPress.
3. News child theme by StudioPress.

What's the deal with StudioPress?

I build most of my websites with the Genesis Framework by StudioPress. The Genesis Framework makes building websites easy and fast. Better yet, you get incredible functionality and flexibility - two features I want and need with pretty much every website I build.

Magazine style websites require a particular function which all 3 above-mentioned StudioPress themes have in spades. This functionality is called "Featured Posts."

What are Featured Posts?

Featured Posts enable you to create listings of article titles with or without excerpts on your home page and/or your sidebar. With Magazine theme, Lifestyle theme, and News theme by StudioPress, you can create as many groupings of featured posts on your home pages you like.

What you get is a variety of groupings of articles on your home page. In fact, you can create as many groupings as you like. You can organize them by Category and/or create custom menus.

It's the Featured Posts functionality that enable you to create a magazine-style website.

Tabber section

Both Magazine child theme and News child theme have a tabber section. This is a "featured post" box where you have tabs to different articles located above-the-fold on the home page. This is where you feature your best or latest articles. It creates a dynamic and attractive home page.

Don't forget the images

With all three magazine themes mentioned above, you can choose to have thumbnails of the first image in your post pull to display with your excerpts. This is an extremely convenient way to create a very attractive website. Each listing is accompanied with an image. Of course, you can easily dictate which listing display an image.

You want readers, don't you?

Without readers, what's the point of publishing a Magazine website (let alone any website). That's where the power of Genesis really comes into play. The Genesis Framework which powers all their child themes, is SEO ready. But this isn't just any "SEO-ready" platform. The SEO panel gives you many options for configuring your on-site SEO including the option to noindex, nofollow, and noarchive individual inner pages.

Ad-Ready

All three Magazine-style WordPress themes mentioned above are Ad-ready. You can place banner ads strategically in your header, within your posts, and/or your sidebar.

Navigation is the key

Many magazine websites have many categories. Many WordPress themes make it difficult to configure your menus so your visitors can easily and quickly find your many categories. Not these three magazine themes. The Genesis Framework integrates perfectly with the WordPress 3.0 platform and in facts works with it so you can create custom menus in all navigation bars as well as your sidebars. You can create many different menus and therefore customize your navigation options within different sections of your website.

A great magazine website is all about subscribers

If you want to earn revenue from advertisers, it sure helps you to say you have a lot of subscribers to your website. StudioPress magazine WordPress themes come with a built-in subscriber widget which makes setting up a subscriber feed very easy.

Build an online empire

Building a successful magazine website is exciting. Building a fleet of successful magazine websites can also be exciting. When you buy a theme from StudioPress, you can use the theme on as many websites as you like. You aren't restricted to a set number of installations (this is one of many reasons I use StudioPress and recommend this theme vendor).

Need help?

Your purchase of a StudioPress theme gives you access to that theme's dedicated forum. I'm on the forum almost every week getting help and ideas. It's a very live forum and the moderators respond to questions usually within 24 hours. The bank of threads on existing themes is a gold-mine of information.

You also get access to theme tutorials showing you the basics of getting your theme live on the Web.