Magazine style blog themes seem to be all the rage right now - with sites like TechCrunch moving to more of a magazine/newspaper style approach for their main blog pages.
Even Chris Pearson has a new magazine style theme coming out soon to complement his successful Thesis Theme.
So when is the right time to use a Magazine style blog theme?
Smashing Magazine took a look earlier this week and offered some advice along with some key descriptors of what makes up a Magazine-style theme:
1. Magazine themes only use excerpts or headlines on the front page, while standard blogs will use either full posts or excerpts.2. A magazine theme functions more as a portal to content on the rest of the site. The magazine theme will give visitors a glimpse at what is available and it will direct them to go in whatever direction they like.
3. Magazine themes make more effort to organize the content of the blog and present what is most important, whereas traditional blog layouts will order front page content based on what is most recent.
The post goes on to outline several pros and cons - along with a ton of resources to help you design your own magazine style theme, find premium wordpress themes in this style, and other great resources.
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Thanks Matt,
As someone that is considering starting a word press blog on his site this article has been very helpful and will defintely be using a magazine style bolg on mine.
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Had used magazine-style themes before and they’re great for multi-topic bloggers like me.
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I think magazine themes are largely overrated for popular use. Very few sites actually require a “magazine theme”, and whenever one is used out of place the signal ends up drowning in the noise.
I predict we are going to see a trend back toward stronger single voices delivered via simple, bold sites. I hope we see this trend beginning sooner rather than later.
I’ve written a good deal about magazine themes at Theme Playground, because I think the topic is a very interesting one, specifically for WordPress as it develops as a CMS. But though the concepts behind this development are interesting, the techniques shouldn’t be implemented by bloggers on a large scale.