With the right premium WordPress magazine theme, a great website can be created very quickly.

The point of using a WordPress theme is that it will save you a ton of time and/or money to create a great looking website with a ton of content.

Sure, you can do some tweaking with images and layout, but at the end of the day… you can really have a website up and running. I love to build great websites quickly.

The question is, which WordPress magazine themes are the best?

Many people search for a free magazine theme. This article explains the dangers of saving a few bucks with a free theme.

In my opinion, the best WordPress Magazine themes are:

1. Magazine child theme by StudioPress.
2. Lifestyle child-thema door StudioPress.
3. News child theme by StudioPress.

What about StudioPress?

I build most of my websites with StudioPress’ Genesis Framework. The Genesis Framework makes building websites easy and fast. Better yet, you get incredible functionality and flexibility – two features I want and need with just about every website I build.

Magazine style websites require a certain feature that all 3 above mentioned StudioPress themes have in spades. This functionality is called “Featured Posts”.

What are Featured Posts?

Featured posts allow you to create lists of article titles with or without excerpts on your homepage and/or your sidebar. With StudioPress Magazine theme, Lifestyle theme, and News theme, you can create as many groups of featured posts on your homepages as you want.

What you get is a variety of groups of articles on your homepage. In fact, you can create as many groupings as you want. You can organize them by category and/or create custom menus.

It is the Featured Posts functionality that allows you to create a magazine style website.

Tab section

Both the Magazine Kids Theme and News Kids Theme have a tabber section. This is a “featured post” box where you have tabs for various articles that are above the fold on the home page. This is where you post your best or newest articles. It creates a dynamic and attractive homepage.

Don’t forget the images

With all three magazine themes listed above, you can choose to display thumbnails of the first image in your post with your snippets. This is an extremely convenient way to create a very attractive website. Each listing is accompanied by an image. Of course, you can easily control which listing an image appears in.

You want readers, don’t you?

What’s the point of publishing a magazine website (let alone a website) with no readers. That’s where the power of Genesis really comes into play. The Genesis Framework that powers all of their underlying themes is SEO ready. But this is not just any “SEO-ready” platform. The SEO panel gives you many options for configuring your on-site SEO, including the option to unindex, track, and archive individual inner pages.

Ready for ads

All three of the magazine-style WordPress themes mentioned above are ad-ready. You can strategically place banner ads in your header, in your posts, and/or your sidebar.

Navigation is key

Many magazine websites have many categories. Many WordPress themes make it difficult to configure your menus so that your visitors can find your many categories easily and quickly. Not these three magazine themes. The Genesis Framework integrates perfectly with the WordPress 3.0 platform and basically works with it, allowing you to create custom menus in all navigation bars and in your sidebars. You can create many different menus and therefore customize your navigation options within different sections of your website.

A great magazine website is all about subscribers

If you want to monetize with advertisers, it certainly helps you to say that you have a lot of subscribers on your website. StudioPress magazine WordPress themes come with a built-in subscriber widget that makes setting up a subscriber feed really easy.

Build an online empire

Building a successful magazine website is exciting. Building a fleet of successful magazine websites can also be exciting. When you buy a theme from StudioPress, you can use the theme on as many websites as you want. You are not limited to a certain number of installs (this is one of the many reasons I use StudioPress and recommend this theme supplier).

Need help?

Your purchase of a StudioPress theme gives you access to that theme’s dedicated forum. I’m on the forum almost every week to get help and ideas. It is a very lively forum and the moderators usually respond to questions within 24 hours. The thread of existing themes is a gold mine of information.

You also get access to theme tutorials that show you the basics of getting your theme live on the web.