For a boutique hotelier, restaurant or other small business, the deLuxe theme is well configured to get a site up and running out of the gate.

A nice touch is the homepage, which features three highlighted areas. Those who are not a fan of the theme’s red/gold color scheme — never fear — it comes with 5 different color options.

Developer: ThemeShift

Features:

More Info | Demo

Delegate is a great choice for a corporate, business or product theme. The look is modern and web 2.0, with a homepage slider. The homepage is laid out in a way to include descriptive text below the slider, as well as an unobtrusive search bar and corporate address. For those that want to maintain a corporate blog, the blog is integrated into the navigation.

Developer: WooThemes

Features:

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ArchiePlus is an impactful theme probably best suited for those looking to build a corporate website or a product website with emphasis on photos, but still want the blog functionality.

Another good use would be for a design company, which is the way the demo is structured. The theme’s homepage features a prominent slider, with a page-based-navigation. Blog categories are featured in the extra wide footer.

Developer: ColorLabsProject

Features:

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This paid theme’s primary magazine feature is a featured articles capability — articles categorized under “featured” occupy the main well. While that’s a neat way to deal with the issue of which stories get prominent/more real estate, the downside of this approach is that articles are bucketed under one category instead of perhaps the categories that they would more naturally fit in. Category navigation is in the big footer.

Sites utilizing the theme:
http://jaypeeonline.net/
http://www.outlawdesignblog.com/

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Less a fixed theme and more a theme system, Shifter allows you to change your blog width, sidebar width and configuration. It comes prepacked with 15 skins and three HP styles — “Blog”, “Blog-Portal” and “Portal”.

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What I like about this paid theme is the great job it does showcasing a lot of content very effectively. The HP manages to squeeze in 13+ article options (1 main well, 5 recent stories, 4 secondary stories with image (in slider), and then 3 more articles (with 3 links each!), yet maintains a clean and balanced feel. Same goes for category/subcategory landing pages, which very gracefully highlights one story, gives another four stories less emphasis, then finally offers up 8 story headlines. Some other very nice touches include a breadcrumb, except in English — i.e. instead of Category > Subcategory > SubsubCategory, this theme has “You are here: Home -> Election ’08 -> Huckabee Angling for Debate With McCain”. Another nice touch is the article -level pages, where color zoning highlights “More from this category” and “More from this author.”

Comments are currently located in the robust footer, which may not be ideal for some, but is probably easy enough to change. Another benefit is the auto image resizer described as follows: “custom script that automatically crops and resizes images – no more creating two or three versions of each image.”

More Info | Live Demo

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