Magazine Themes
Daily Edition by WOO Themes
Overview: Daily Edition is a great magazine styled theme that is definitely worth the price.
This is a very rare theme, the price is fairly competitive and the features that it includes really makes it worth the price.
The theme has some very unique features including a javascript based homepage, with a featured story slider, thumbnail previews, and sixteen color themes (amazing quality).
The homepage is also very customizable. You can decide on how many articles you want displayed in either a full width or box style, which allows you to customize the theme even more for your blog sites need.
Navigation: The navigation on Daily Edition is extraordinary. The page navigation is located on the top of the page against the edge of the browser. The navigation is contrasting the rest of the theme with a dark background (compared to a white background throughout the rest of the theme). Here is where I have one suggestion for the theme, the text is a bit small for the top and feels cramped and to smooth, in a bad way. The words are very cramped together and the font is not crisp enough. I think a font a size bigger would really help here and some more spacing between the letters. The font also doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the design. With some tweaking on the navigation bar, this theme would be close to perfect.
The categories are horizontally displayed under the logo, a theme that has been very popular in magazine style Wordpress themes such as Daily Edition. The categories bar here is nearly perfect and I have no complaints, only praise for the simplicity and typography here.
Content Display: The content slider featured below the categories bar is beautifully simplistic. The “Featured Post” typography above the image and over the image is wonderful, and really makes this theme pop.
The slider rotates automatically and also has arrows and dots to click to rotate the three most recent highlighted posts.
Below This is where the full width or box posts appear. You can choose which categories display which way, and how many full width or box posts to display. The demo theme features just one full width article and looks very good.
The box and full width displays of the content continue the light design and look really great yet again.
Sidebar: The sidebar features all the widgets you could want. The top Javascript portion features recent posts, tags, and comments in a very easy to navigate text slider.
The sidebar features big title text and a very simplistic design as well. It just works.
Conclusion: Daily Edition by WOO Themes is a great Wordpress theme that should definitely be looked at by anyone looking for an amazing Magazine Style Wordpress Theme.
Daily Edition is available from WOO Themes website for two prices as the standard edition for $70 US, or as the Developer Edition for $150.
StudioPress Magazine Theme
Overview: Despite the generic name for this theme, StudioPress’ magazine Wordpress theme is a good take on this style of themes. The theme is a great basic theme that does need some work, but is worth a look and a few modifications could be a top theme that can easily fit your needs.
The theme is a fixed, two column, and compatible with Wordpress 2.9.
Navigation: The two navigation bars are on top of one another the top being the pages links and the bottom bar being the category links. The top navigation features rounded corners and is very simple. The categories feature a barstyle gradient, but the gradient looks very unnatural, even from Photoshop, the gradient is very abrupt and doesn’t really flow well.
Underneath the categories list their is a nice big search box that stands out very well against the theme (in a good way). A lot of the time a search box is an overlooked feature that is tucked away in bad placement. Also next to the search box is a Topics section that features all of the categories in a drop down selection box, allowing your readers to get to the content they want without having to search through all of the categories.
Advertising Support: StudioPress’s Magazine theme features good advertisement support in the sidebar, however it is limited to one block. The theme does not have any other areas that are specific to advertisements but does have some places that ads could be put into the posts or summaries.
Content Display: The content on the homepage is displayed much like other Wordpress magazine style themes. However, instead of featuring fancy flash this is much lighter, being done in code instead. This allows for a very fast load of all of the sections that you can tab through and look at. This method of displaying the content works wonderfully and I wish it would be included in more themes this way.
Under this, the content is displayed in priority for your most popular sections and another advertising space is included under the main content display, which is perfect placement right in the middle of the content your readers will be viewing most.
Sidebar: The sidebar is laid out very well with great typography and spacing of the text and content. The RSS and newsletter are on top, with recent posts, featured videos and others displayed down a wide single column sidebar that looks very good. Not many people get excited about sidebars, but this is probably one of the best I have seen.
Conclusion: This theme is a good start in my opinion. However I think that the color pink does not suit many applications for this theme, and most users would want to modify that color out and put some blue or red in.
I do not think this should be considered a premium theme and think that your money can be spent better elsewhere on a different theme.
The theme is available for $59.95 individually or for $199.95 featuring all of StudioPress’ designs, which is a great deal and features fourteen different themes and support for that price.
WP-Genius – Beautiful Contrasting Wordpress Theme
Overview: WP-Genius is another magazine style theme from SoloStream. The design has eight color options which is great for easy customization, has a settings page for tweaking it to your contents need, thumbnails included in posts, a content glider, perfect for SEO and banner and logo integration which is very easy using the theme settings page.
WP-Genius is also two column and the sidebar can have widgets installed without hassle (a feature which rocks and when not present really hurts a themes use).
Navigation: The navigation menu goes along the top bar right under the logo and advertisement with a great search bar that sticks out very well against the dark background.
The navigation tries really hard to be unique on WP-Genius but falls short. The color that they choose for your current page is a lime green. Which is fine, but looks awful with the default blue theme. There is no correlation between the two colors and it looks like it was just picked because someone thought it looked cool. It does, but not with this themes color.
The drop down portion of WP-Genius also feels added in for effect. It features a plain and ugly grey background and bad border color choice and leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth for what could be a great navigation bar.
Content Display: The content on WP-Genius is displayed well on the top content glider as they call it. But the text they choose for the titles of the other articles to click through here is to small and feels cramped to me. It is a beautiful use of grey however, and the small thumbnails bring tons of color to the dark areas.
The content below for the other categories is disappointing. The thumbnails look good again, I am not sure if it is the example choices of photos or what, but the text looks cramped and the choice they used for font size is a bit small for my taste.
Sidebar: The sidebar does not start until almost halfway down the page (I had to scroll on my MacBook to see it) and seems kind of hidden away next to the rest of the content that most people will probably never read anyways.
Conclusion: This theme had a lot of potential to really wow me, but falled pretty short. The advertising implementation is good, the navigation is iffy, and the content area left me bored and waiting to scroll away. The colors were fine, but the lack of “wow” on this theme made me wish for something more.
Solostream has WP-Genius available for a single user license for $79.00 and a multiple site license for $179.00.
WP-Clear Magazine WordPress Theme
Overview: WP-Clear is a premium magazine style WordPress theme from the group at Solostream, makers of great WordPress themes.
WP-Clear is a very beautiful, light, and simplistic theme. The color theme is in white and grey with accents of blue and black. The theme colors work good, and you could easily modify the accent colors due to them being limited to links mainly, giving you a small custom tweak to make WP-Clear work with your content better.
Navigation: The navigation in WP-Clear is very intuitive. The page navigation goes along the top of page with simple text links with drop down menus on selected pages that have subpages. This is a great way to keep a clean top navigation bar and makes navigating for users very easy. The top navigation also features the search bar in the upper right hand corner which is easy to spot and simple in nature.
Instead of having a set “categories” sidebar featuring all the different subject areas the categories are in a horizantal bar underneath the title/logo and advertisement. This works really well in keeping with a magazine/newspaper look and keeps the theme consistent and easy to follow. The navigation here is also very simple but works well, with light borders and plain blue text it is easy to determine where you want to go and to get there easily.
Advertising Support: WP-Clear does a great job at showing you the best place to incorporate your advertisements and displays them in the theme for you. The advertisement isn’t to excessive but may be a bit much for some people and could leave users that don’t want that much advertising with some awkward whitespace. The ad placement is good but some may find it to excessive and may have to do some modifications to make it work for their website.
Content Display: The way that WP-Clear displays content on the main page is some of the best I have seen from a WordPress theme. The top is a flash looking overview banner that rotates through large images and content titles and displays it beautifully. Under that are thumbnails that allow you to change the big picture and read the title of the post.
Below the top eye candy are category overviews with three of the most recent posts from your four top categories. These all feature thumbnails as well and works very well for display a lot of your content for your viewers to select from.
Below those four main category areas are the recent articles of the rest of the blog and categories. These are your other articles or posts that are not part of the four main categories and displays them in a stream view (vertically) and features the standard thumbnail size.
Sidebar: The sidebar is where most of the advertisements are but it manages to stay pretty clean while having a lot of content. The top is 300×250 banner, followed by the RSS and email subscription section.
Recent comments and two ad spaces follow along with the tags and yet more advertisement spaces. The meta links are also present.
Conclusion: Although the sidebar is laden with advertisements it does work well and keeps with the overall theme. I would give this theme an 8/10, great style, a bit over simplistic navigation and the sidebar is a bit cluttered even though it is easy to follow.
