Top 10 Best WordPress Magazine Themes

Magazine/news style websites are fast gaining popularity in recent years. Many of such websites owners found that these type of themes provide a great way to share information and images while maintaining a professional look.

What are Magazine Themes

Usually, magazine themes are powerful and have attractive display features. They generally:

• have customizable sliders, image areas, various fonts & color scheme options, among other features, to create a website that stands out.
• make good use of the website space, in order to deliver as much content as possible without leaving your visitors feeling claustrophobic.
• use catchy headlines on your homepage instead of full posts

Top 10 Best WordPress Magazine Themes

With the increase in demand for such websites, there is also an increase of magazine style themes available, especially for the popular WordPress. Just Google for it and you will see what I mean. So I have decided to review them and provide an overview of some great premium magazine themes.

Why premium themes when tons of free WordPress magazine themes abound on the Internet? Well, while free themes are great in helping you save a few dollars, they tend to be filled with backlinks for the designers. Plus, free themes do not come with support or updates and you never know when these themes would be removed or be made premium themes. Thus, it is advisable to go with premium themes in the first place.

Here’s my list of the top 10 best magazine-style WordPress premium themes.

1. TheSource

TheSource is a flashy 3-column theme but not in a bad way. In fact, it is very pleasing and well organized, which is not surprising considering that it is from Elegant Themes.

It has 4 very unique and striking color schemes ie dark/black, grey, blue and red, where at least one is able to help you create the right mood for your visitors.

One thing I like about TheSource is the availability of lots of widgetized areas. On the homepage, there are 4 feature boxes where you get to highlight the latest posts. There are also lots of widgets areas on the left and right sidebar columns and footer.

TheSource is great for online magazine style websites and blogs looking for a vibrant outlay.

2. LeetPress

Here’s good news for all gaming review website owners. ThemeForest’s LeetPress is one super cool gaming theme with amazing review system and lots of gaming related widgets and shortcodes eg Latest Reviews (with tabs), Game info box and so on. Sure is bound to make your followers drop their jaws in awe!

I absolutely love the homepage full width slider. Comes with 5 custom pages ie Screenshots, Reviews, Video, Blog/News and Full width pages.

LeetPress projects a very organized and clean design. So you don’t have to worry about messing up your website once your reviews increases. Loads pretty fast too and is SEO friendly.

This magazine WordPress theme is perfect for those wishing to build a gaming review website. Check it out!

3. WhosWho

Here’s another stylish WordPress theme, WhosWho. It’s actually Nick’s first magazine news theme for ElegantThemes and even after all these years, this design is still a hot favorite!

I guess it has lots to do with the clean and well-organized layout. A little on the serious side but the color schemes will come in handy to add a splash of brightness to it. Has lots of widget-enabled areas and a featured article section on the homepage. WhosWho is a 3-column theme that uses lots of thumbnails.

This theme is excellent for news portal type of website, though it’s flexible enough to be used for blogs and portfolio websites.

4. Lifestyle

Lifestyle is StudioPress’ 4th best selling themes in 2011. Once you take a look at the design and its features, you will understand why.

It is a 3-column Genesis Child Theme that requires the Genesis Framework to work. Layouts are clean with clever use of bright colors. Lots of options including 10 theme color styles, 6 layout options and custom backgrounds & headers as well as widgets. PSD file for the header graphic is available too with the release of Lifestyle 2.0 version.

Lifestyle is so flexible that it can be customized into many different websites including online magazines (but of course), blogs and personal websites.

5. Spectrum

“Visually rich magazine theme” is how WooThemes’ Spectrum is being described as. And rightly so too. If you are looking for a WordPress theme that can handle lots of images neatly, then do consider Spectrum.

There are 7 widgetized areas at the sidebar and footer regions. Adding post tabber, video player, Flickr, Twitter streams, blog information and ads had never been easier, with the help of its custom widgets.

Oh, and don’t forget about the cool tag-based slider on the homepage. And the 10 alternative color schemes for you to choose from. Magazine/news, photography sites and blogs owners will find this theme interesting.

6. Continuum

Continuum available on ThemeForest is another popular magazine theme, mainly because it comes with an awesome built-in review and rating feature! This feature allows the theme to be easily customized into a magazine news website as well as a review blog (eg music, movies, video games, books).

Other notable features of Continuum is that it supports 3 custom menus, 19 unique sidebar widget areas, 11 custom widgets (eg floating ad blocks) and 6 color skins & 28 matching backgrounds.

There are also 5 custom jQuery content sliders, which include the ever impressive Nivo slider, a “breaking” posts slider at the top most of your homepage as well as the “Recent Reactions” slider which continuously scroll comments.

7. Magazine

StudioPress’ Magazine theme is a child theme which works on the Genesis Framework. The recently released Magazine 2.1 has been updated to being a mobile responsive design, where you website can be easily viewed on various mobile browsers.

Other interesting features include 7 color styles, 6 layout options (you get both left and right sidebars options), custom background and threaded comments. Those who would benefit from this theme are magazine/news sites and blogs.

8. eGamer

Here’s another theme that would interest gamers, the eGamer from Elegant Themes. There are loads of gaming options available here that would excite even the hardest to please gamers.

There’s the crucial video embedding / recent videos display option, most gamers request for. Another cool thing is the “recent videos” section on your homepage. It searches and lists down all the video posts.

Gamers would also be pleased with the author rating system, where you get to assign a 0-5 star rating to the selected video game. Again, there’s also the “recent reviews” section too.

Websites suitable for the eGamer theme: video game bloggers of course!

9. Volt

You will find Volt from ThemeForest a great theme for online magazine/news/editorial websites. This theme certainly has no shortage of widget areas and widgets with 7 widgetized areas (header, 2 at sidebars and 4 at footer) and 10 custom widgets that include Flickr, Twitter, Social Media icons, sliders, mini folio among others.

Volt is available in 2 formats:

• Volt with Timthumb – where images are resizable
• Volt with Native WP Thumbnails – images resized using WordPress’ Thumbnails feature

And finally, my favorite WordPress Magazine theme of all (drum roll please)…

10. TheStyle

Now, here’s a truly unique and amazingly clean theme. TheStyle by ElegantThemes is a theme that will turn heads.

This theme’s homepage provides an excellent way for you to display your posts excerpts and photography works. It is similar to a story board. The posts excerpts and images are featured in horizontal frames. When hovered over, the post will display more text and a link to the full post page. At the same time, all the other posts are dimmed to create a contrast.

Another smart feature of TheStyle is the unique jQuery-enhanced fluid-width design that allows the posts to be appropriately displayed according to your visitors’ resolution, similar to the effect of a responsive theme.

Why is this theme my favorite? Simple. Because of its versatility. It is a sophisticated WordPress theme site that can be customized for a variety of different websites, be it magazine/news, blogs, entertainment, designs, photography and anything you can think of.

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So whether you are planning to create a new website or to redesign your current website, I do hope that you will find the above list a useful resource. With the variety of features highlighted in them, I am pretty sure you will find something that will suit your taste. Enjoy and do share which is your favorite WordPress theme!