Since I re-launched my website, I was planning to create my own wordpress theme. While I was trying new templates and plugins to get some ideas for my first theme, I noticed that the magazine style or premium themes are gaining a lot of popularity both among theme developers and wordpress users. The idea behind magazine style themes is to make the site more content focused by improving its structure and navigation.

The main difference between a normal theme and a magazine style theme is the structure and layout. While the websites using conventional Wordpress themes look more like a blog with the home page displaying some of the recent posts, magazine style templates can be customized to show recently added posts from different categories to target different audience.

For example, if you are using a normal theme which displays last three posts on the home page and you have three categories food, movies and travel. If your last three posts are in category food, the home page wont display any post related to movies or travel. On the other hand magazine style themes can be customized to display recent post (or excerpt) from more than one category on the home page. This can be easily achieved by using tabbed menu or featured category. Using the same example, in case of a magazine style theme, a user can see recent post related to food, movies and travel on the same page. This, along with features like related posts and posts in same category are used in magazine style themes to attract more visitors and direct them to more posts related to their area of interest which is beneficial for both site visitors and blogger. Along with tabbed menu, use of featured category can also be used to advertise any selected post on the home page.

Along with improved layout, magazine style themes are easy to customize and provide in-built support for many necessary plugins. Some of the advance magazine style themes come with their own option page from where we can customize the look and content of our website with almost no code changes.

The current theme active on my site is my first attempt to develop my own magazine style theme, it still needs a lot of testing, bug fixing and plugin support, which might take another 2-3 weeks. But once this theme is ready, I might release it on my website for free download.

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