Help me find a Wordpress solution to a web design...situation.

March 7, 2008 2:54 PM

Suggest a Wordpress theme or other Wordpress-based solution to make my small magazine's web presence spiffier? Maybe something with featured content and a separate blog/news area on the same page?

I run a little zine/literary magazine type thing called 400 Words. It has the obligatory website. I post original stories by other people, and the occasional blog-style comment from myself. I sell magazines and let people know how to submit stories to me. The back-end is Wordpress. Right now, I'm using Chris Pearson's 'Cutline' theme.

I've had the website on hiatus for a little while, and now that I'm getting back to it, I hate how it looks! So I am shopping around for a new Wordpress theme, and I want some suggestions. In particular, I'd like a theme that allows me to post two different kinds of content: to differentiate the stories from the bloggy bits. Can I use a web-comic theme for this? A photo-blogging theme? It would be cool to be able to have a featured story that really pops, maybe just one entry on the main page, with a 'previous story' link or even something that gives you another story at random...the content is basically evergreen, not timely.

I gravitate towards nice typography and a clean look, but what I've got now, I think, veers over clean and into boring. I'm not a very good coder but can probably tweak one or two little things about a theme. Anybody have favorites they think would work for a small-time publication? I don't want to spend all my time running this website and I don't need it to look like a 'real' magazine, but I do need a new look as a shot in the arm.

posted by toomuchkatherine to technology (9 comments total)

Revolution Magazine costs some coin, but it is a great theme for magazines.
posted by chrisalbon at 3:05 PM on March 7, 2008

Thanks, Chris. Have you ever worked with it? Is it complicated to use, compared to a plain-vanilla blog theme?
posted by toomuchkatherine at 3:13 PM on March 7, 2008

A very unscientific google survey on my part seems to suggest that The Morning After is a popular (and free!) magazine-style template for Wordpress:
http://themasterplan.in/themes/the-morning-after/

And here's a comparison with Revolution:
http://gotchance.com/2007/10/24/the-morning-after-vs-your-revolution/
posted by sanitycheck at 3:26 PM on March 7, 2008

Not a newspaper or magazine theme but I checked out Revolution and I think Deep Blue could make a good fit too. Not to throw in a self link but you can see what it looks like with a couple plugins on my site too: bleucube.com
posted by bleucube at 4:12 PM on March 7, 2008

a google search for "the best magazine-style wordpress themes" nets a bunch of results.
posted by softlord at 5:14 PM on March 7, 2008

I've been looking at a number of these with an eye toward breaking my own blog out of its traditional tubular format. My favorite of the bunch is currently the Flash News Theme.
posted by deCadmus at 5:44 PM on March 7, 2008

I would recommend Mimbo 2.0, but definitely read the how-to on doing features, author photos and the like. Once you read it, the whole set-up makes perfect sense, but it is by no means intuitive.
posted by grabbingsand at 5:44 PM on March 7, 2008

I'm a fan of Kaushal Sheth's themes, myself. Perhaps he might have one that would work for you.

(Oh, and bleucube, I love that Deep Blue theme. Their other themes looked nice too.)
posted by gemmy at 6:32 PM on March 7, 2008

Mimbo. We looked at a bunch when we went to redo our theater's website, and it's pretty easy to change anything you don't like.
posted by Medieval Maven at 7:08 PM on March 7, 2008