Comments on: Help me find a Wordpress solution to a web design...situation.

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

toomuchkatherine — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:54:31 -0800

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.

By: chrisalbon

chrisalbon — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:05:23 -0800

Revolution Magazine costs some coin, but it is a great theme for magazines.

By: toomuchkatherine

toomuchkatherine — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:13:21 -0800

Thanks, Chris. Have you ever worked with it? Is it complicated to use, compared to a plain-vanilla blog theme?

By: sanitycheck

sanitycheck — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:26:12 -0800

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/

By: bleucube

bleucube — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:12:20 -0800

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

By: softlord

softlord — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:14:19 -0800

a google search for "the best magazine-style wordpress themes" nets a bunch of results.

By: deCadmus

deCadmus — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:44:19 -0800

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.

By: grabbingsand

grabbingsand — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:44:58 -0800

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.

By: gemmy

gemmy — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:32:22 -0800

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.)

By: Medieval Maven

Medieval Maven — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:08:43 -0800

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.