Cheap VS Expensive

I am pretty sure you know this great website Nettuts+, naturally they use WordPress platform as web site engine.

Nettuts+ is a site aimed at web developers and designers offering tutorials and articles on technologies, skills and techniques to improve how you design and build websites.

It uses unique template as theme. In my opinion their portal and theme style could be described as  ’Magazine Style Website‘. I absolutely love their wordpress unique template, but you must know that their theme was build from scratch. That means if you want to start ‘Magazine Style’ website and your goal is to have a unique WP theme you need to pay, pay a lot. To see what I am talking about view Nettuts+ website. Preview image is below, click on it to see the website.

Here is a little sample of their theme look: Nettuts+

For me it’s an amazing theme for magazine style portals. I will try to explain what you need to have in the template to create a good magazine style website based on WordPress.

So what do we need in template to make it work properly ?

1. Header

• Good Header Logo
• Simple horizontal menu

You can add two menus. First menu will include links to static pages like : ‘Home’ , ‘Contact’, ‘About’. Second one will show names of categories on your portal. It should only show  main categories so that people can see what  your major topics are.

• RSS Subcribe

It should be of significant size and inform people that they should subcribe your RSS.

2. Sidebar

• Ads

In Magazine Style themes there should be an ads field  on the sidebar, the best way is to show 125×125 ads.

• About information

A field with short  information is a good idea. You can also show readers your best stories there.

3. Main Area

Look at Nettuts, it’s an ideal example of what I’m talking about with good ideas such as: short preview posts with images, undelining the  number of comments showing the popularity of your posts.

4. Single Post View

This is a very important part of your template, it should be really nice for the ‘Magazine theme’.

Look at Nettuts example here: Introducing Flashtuts+.

What we need to have in single post view is:

• Author information
• Related Posts
• Social bookmarking
• Great comments

5. Footer

Well this part is your choice, you can create something unique and original or follow certain standards.

Now I have Good News for every WordPress user ! & Magazine Style Website fan !

The aim of this post was to show you how to build ‘Magazine Style’ theme using free or cheap methods with WordPress. I managed to find a great theme that you can build great portals with and it costs only 25$. Furthermore, you can pay more money and talk to the author or any other designer to customize your theme.

Look at this theme, it is based on the same techniques as Nettuts+ premium theme.

Convergence – Community WordPress Theme

What can we get almost for free ?

1. Header logo

2. Top Menus

3. 125×125 ads in sidebar

4. ideal main area view with image fields

5. single posts

5a. author field

5b. related posts & popular posts

5c. social bookmarking

5d. comments field

Conclusions:

I believe that you can take about 70% or even 80 % of an ideal magazine style website\theme from this template. So work a bit on that extra 20%, customize logos, add whatever you want and you will end up with a low cost Magazine Style theme ready for your portal.

Magic … ? …. answer is WordPress !!!

Convergence – Community WordPress Theme

Download | Live Demo