Wordpress Magazine Themes, Defined

What exactly defines a magazine/premium/news Wordpress theme? Here’s what I look for:

• FLEXIBILITY: Blogs do a great job of showcasing content in a very specific way — chronologically. And people who read blogs depend on that chronological order to figure out what to read and whether they’ve already read it. Magazine Wordpress themes also *generally* showcase content in a chronological fashion, inasmuch as their content is timely (i.e. do you really want something you wrote 5 years ago on your HP?), but allow more flexibility in terms of what content to feature and how much real estate to give it. Whether that’s in the form of a “main well” or a news slider, doesn’t make so much difference.

• CONTENT ORGANIZATION & ACCESSIBILITY: Once again I’ll have to make a comparison with a traditional blog structure. Beyond a search box, or perhaps a tag cloud or just a listing of categories, it’s difficult to find older/deep content in a blog. In a magazine-type site, I still look for all of the “best practice” features, like most popular/most commented/most recent as well as a prominent search and tags (if used). Call me old school, but I still love a traditional hierarchical navigation structure. Why? Tags are great, but I think of them as one way to access content. Hierarchical navigation allows edit to provide yet another way to access posts. And I think this is best accomplished through a theme that offers category-based navigation.

• PROMINENT SEARCH: A hallmark of any good site. But especially important for perennial, content-heavy sites.

• PROMINENT RSS/EMAIL: Again, assuming you update your site frequently, this is a good thing to have on most sites. Assuming you are in the free content business, email and RSS are not just great ways to build a regular visitors, but they’re also a great marketing/monetization channel.

• IMAGE HANDLING: Ties into flexibility with real estate and featured posts. I’ve seen some themes where the thumbnail is different than the image within the post, and variations of that. I think the ability to easily display a thumbnail and an image within a post are both key.

• ADVERTISING: Love em or hate em, content sites are typically ad supported, unless you can get people to pay for subscriptions to your content like the WSJ, and even they’ve got advertising. So it’s fantastic when a theme incorporates standard sized ads (and if not those, then at least default Google adsense sizes) into a theme. I suppose it’s easy enough to tweak themes to include ads, but they should really not be an afterthought.