Say you’re looking for a theme for your obscure literary publication. Or perhaps it’s a poetry site. Or something else very artsy. Voila: Press! This Wordpress theme is the one for you. The homepage showcases a lot of content while still remaining very clean and visually appealing.

Category-level pages put the focus on photos, so make sure that is important to you. One minor complaint: the styling of the comment area is a big bold for my taste, but other than that, lovely.

Developer: Obox Design

Features:

More Info | Demo

AgentPress is a child theme designed for real estate agents and brokers. It features property listings while maintaining blog functionality. Nice features include breadcrumbs (links at the top, showing where you are), and logical, well-designed property listing pages. The homepage slider is also nicely designed, with a rotating slider with caption.

Cons include single-criteria search, which is pretty critical in real estate searches. Photos also seem a touch slow to load. However, in other respects this theme gets the job done.

Developer: StudioPress

Features:

More Info | View Demo

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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Categories are given left-hand menu treatment in this theme from ThemeSpinner.

The HP does a nice job of featuring stories in three separate ways – through the flash slideshow, through three more featured articles and five more articles in list form below.

Recent articles, comments and most recent (unclear how recent articles and most recent differ) and ad slots are given right and left-hand column treatment. Comes with advertising integrated.

Live Demo | More Info

By the same maker as minimalist Visualization and the Gridline series, Monochrome is a visually arresting theme that places a lot of emphasis on images. So if your photos are not as great as the ones featured on the site, then you may way to think again. Monochrome has a lot of solid magazine-style features, like category-based-navigation (with dropdown subcategories), as well as category representation under the main feature and above the big footer. Check out variations Monochrome Gallery, Monochrome Author and Monochrome Lite.

Live Demo | More Info

This Wordpress theme by Solostream offers critical magazine-style features with some emphasis on community. A big check to my #1 must-have — a category-based nav — as well as a large and potentially auto-scrolling main feature. But prominent too is the “most popular”/comments/tags/etc block on the HP; recent comments and gravatars get play as well. Comments on the article pages are nicely color-blocked.

The version I’m referring to is the version in the live demo; the theme comes with several different layouts for its HP and category pages.

Live Demo | More Info

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

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.

More Info/Live Demo

No, the screenshot you are looking at is not CNN. Can’t tell whether it’s the font, the red or something else, but this theme certainly lives up to its name. Gazette is a solid mag-style (or should I say, news-style) theme in a three-column HP design, with some standout features, such as the arresting auto-scroll main feature as well as most-recent posts from different categories as the secondary featured articles.

As with many of PremiumNewsTheme themes, Gazette has prominent search, rss/email and “most popular” module — all tops for me.

More Info | Live Demo