The creators call this theme a “premium blog” and not “premium magazine” theme, but we’re including it here anyway as a robust blog or gallery/photo-heavy theme.

The focus on typeface (Helvetica / Georgia / Verdana / Courier used) and reliance on images is the main draw with this very clean and modern looking theme. It’s available in free and premium ($45); premium comes with all views, page templates, support as well as no branding.

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Gorgeous and clean Wordpress theme with a two tiered-navigation menu — page-based and category-based. The majority of the homepage is taken up by the featured story (appears to be the latest story). Nice features include a slick “most popular” sidebar with popular, comments, latest and tags. Another unique feature is the robust footer which manages to pack in six stories in three selected categories. Currently does not come with advertising already implemented.

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This minimalist theme takes a pyramid approach to content display — one feature story/large image, beneath that three smaller features (with smaller images), then as the base, five thumbnail features bolstered by a big footer. The main nav menu is a bit different than many themes in that it incorporates both pages and categories (sub pages and categories in drop down). An upper nav repeats the categories. Overall a nice theme, but the white space beneath the main story seems underutilized. If you like this theme, you may also want to check out Gridline, a theme by the same maker, Graph Paper Press.

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From the same maker (Graph Paper Press) as Visualization, this minimalist theme itself has a number of variations — Gridline Lite and Gridline News.

This theme is similar to Visualization, except the 2nd tier of featured stories are adjacent to the main story instead of beneath them — a layout I personally prefer. The main nav menu also incorporates both pages and categories (which means that subcategories are relegated to a drop down). I like the theme’s look-and-feel, but think it would benefit from categories directly on the nav instead of under Categories. Another minor point — it would be nice if the search box was bigger and more prominent.

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Beautiful theme. Definitely in the design-y camp and probably less for those who are interested in a text-heavy site. But I see applications of this including a recipe site, an agency website, or perhaps a travel site — anything where a visual representation of the information would have more of an impact.

Unique features: LOVE the text and # of comments overlaid on images, simple and effective color scheme, and the list of categories with counts of posts elegantly implemented in the footer.

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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.”

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Among all of PremiumNewsTheme’s themes (See the Live Wire series, for example), I’ve got a soft spot for Flash News. I like the auto scrolling main feature (which runs a touch too fast, but that can be changed), I like the look-and-feel, and I really like how the two nav menus are separated. I also like that there’s a separate video channel, and I like the big footer. I’m not particularly fond of the flickr widget, but I’m sure that too can easily be changed.

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