I wanted to title this “9 Great Magazine-Style WordPress Themes in One Place: And Why You Should Consider a Membership with a Quality WordPress Theme Provider”. But as you can see, that’s a paragraph, not a title. Ha!
There are a ton of free WordPress themes out there, and many of them are excellent. If you can find a free one you like, go for it!
If, however, you don’t find a free one that suits you, turn your attention to the so-called “premium WordPress themes” — the ones you pay for.
Premium WordPress Theme Providers
Generally, you can expect to pay anywhere from $15-$120 for a good theme. Price is not necessarily an indicator of quality in this industry. Some $25 themes are just as good as the $100 themes a few clicks away. The really good deals are the ones where you can pay a little extra and get access to ALL their themes.
Sometimes you find a good theme by a designer who only created that one theme, but more often you find a collection of premium themes all in one place by one company or one designer. A few popular ones:
- Elegant Themes (my preferred provider at the moment)
- StudioPress (I have used a few of theirs)
- WooThemes (I have used one or two of theirs, and they have a magazine category)
- Templatic
- Mojo Themes (a marketplace where many designers can sell their themes)
How to Choose a Theme
When you’re looking at a theme demo (a sort of “preview” dummy website using the theme you’re considering purchasing), it can be tricky trying to imagine what your content will look like in that theme. It’s not always easy (or possible) to know what elements you’re looking at are “built in” and which are “content” that was added to flesh things out for the demo. One of these days I’ll do an article illustrating some basic guidelines for this, but for now all I can say it, “it’s hard to know for sure”.
That’s why it’s such a good deal when you can sign up with a theme provider that gives you access to ALL their themes for one price. If you find a provider whose overall design style you like, then you may have half a dozen of their themes that are potential matches for your project. WordPress allows you to “try out” a theme on your website so easily, and if you don’t like one of them, try another until you find one that works for you.
A $40 or $100 subscription to a theme club is still FAR less expensive than a $2,000-$4,000 custom-designed WordPress website.
Without Further Ado — The Themes
Click on any of the thumbnail screenshots to see a live demo of the theme. Some of the demo’s are even customizable (you can change colors and textures interactively).
Aggregate
Bold
Chameleon
Delicate News
eNews
Glow
TheSource
TheStyle
Who’s Who
Check out the rest of the Elegant Themes collection here:
Full Disclosure: While this may look like some sort of blatant promotion of my Elegant Themes affiliate link, it’s really something else. A friend was asking about magazine-style WordPress themes, and since I have a membership with a top-notch theme club, I looked around the Elegant Themes archives and found nine beautiful magazine themes.
I bought a membership with ET because they make good stuff. Their designs are beautiful to the eye, they’re easy to use, they’re fun to customize. I’m a fan. I’m a customer. And now I’m an affiliate. So if you click my link to them and sign up, I’ll get a commission. As always, I recommend them because they rock, not because they give me money.
2 Comments
Brad Bush · at
Thanks for sharing. I would like you to take a look at this NEWS, Magazine related WordPress theme named Ybrant
It has following features as,
~ Fully Widgetized Home Page
~ 15+ Custom Widgets
~ 10+ Theme Shortcodes
~ Gallery and Video Post Format Support and much more…
Teddi · at
Thanks, Brad. I like that it’s a Woo-based theme; they have an excellent framework. The live demo was rather slow to load, but it was also extremely graphics-heavy. Hopefully it would load faster if one didn’t have as many images. Even a news site should make things a little easier on people who browse through — too many options can be paralyzing. But the theme seems like it would have good flexibility.
I’d be interested to see some examples of sites that are using the theme in the wild.