How to Make a Magazine Style Theme for WordPress

I don’t know if you guys have been noticing, I have been writing a whole lot about wordpress. The reason why I was doing that because I wanted to write a post about How to make a Magazine Style Theme for WordPress. The post would get so big If I try to make it one, therefore I put it in different peices, so I can put it all together when I think I have enough peices. In this post I will show you how to make a Magazine Style Theme for WordPress. I will also tell you some of the advantages of it.

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**This tutorial is an intermediate level tutorial. I am assuming you can already design, and code in html. **

First you need to have a simple blog design in place. Make it very simple. Header, Footer, Sidebar and Content.

First thing you would need to do is Create a Custom Page in wordpress and make it your homepage. If you read I have already showed you both ways in the post above. Now you would also need to make a separate blog page. I have showed one way to make a blog page in the post above.

The Raw Code Method to make a custom blog page is here. It is if you use the Raw Code method to make a home page.

Next thing you want to decide what to put on your home page to make it a magazine style theme. Few advices:

Display Recent Posts on the homepage and in the sidebar of the blog pages.

Display the Most Recent Posts from your main categories making it like a column so it looks like a magazine or newspaper.

Use my tutorial about How to Add a Dynamic Sidebar in WordPress, so you can use your widgets anywhere on the template other than the sidebar.

That way you can display The Most Popular Posts on the homepage as well.

Make an Archive Page for your WordPress.

Add a Contact form in WordPress

You can Create as many custom pages in wordpress for different purposes.

You Now have a general Idea to setup a Magazine style WordPress Theme. If you need anything else feel free to ask your question in the comment box and I will try to answer the question in the comment or in my future posts.

Next thing you want to consider is the SEO Friendly URLs for WordPress also known as Permalink structures.

Don’t forget to give your Website it’s Identity. In other words, add a Fav Icon. The post explains how to add one.

When you are working on your comment area don’t forget that I have written a post about how to Pimp Your Comment Area. It have some great plugins that relates to comments.

I have made a list of the top 5 WordPress plugins in my list as of July 2008, so get those.

If you are going to add advertisers, I haven’t seen a better plugin then OIOPublishers to Manage my Advertisers.

Keep the site simple and clean. I have written about How to Optimize your Blog Page to Attract Readers. Read that.

Once you have everything done, don’t forget to Check on your W3C Validation. I have written a guide with tips on w3c validation for your site. Read those.

The advantages of having a magazine style theme is that your blog looks more then a blog. You can make it more like a portal with other things going on. It becomes more of a community. Your page views increases. That is one of the future trends that I have been seeing in the designs.

These tips are not just for blogs. These also help when you are using wordpress to set up custom websites other than blogs.

Hopefully this helps. Like I said this is a intermediate level tutorial. If you have any questions feel free to ask.