I wanted to title this “9 Great Magazine-Style WordPress Themes in One Place: And Why You Should Consider a Membership with a Quality WordPress Theme Provider”. But as you can see, that’s a paragraph, not a title. Ha!

There are a ton of free WordPress themes out there, and many of them are excellent. If you can find a free one you like, go for it!

If, however, you don’t find a free one that suits you, turn your attention to the so-called “premium WordPress themes” — the ones you pay for.

Premium WordPress Theme Providers

Generally, you can expect to pay anywhere from $15-$120 for a good theme. Price is not necessarily an indicator of quality in this industry. Some $25 themes are just as good as the $100 themes a few clicks away. The really good deals are the ones where you can pay a little extra and get access to ALL their themes.

Sometimes you find a good theme by a designer who only created that one theme, but more often you find a collection of premium themes all in one place by one company or one designer. A few popular ones:

How to Choose a Theme

When you’re looking at a theme demo (a sort of “preview” dummy website using the theme you’re considering purchasing), it can be tricky trying to imagine what your content will look like in that theme. It’s not always easy (or possible) to know what elements you’re looking at are “built in” and which are “content” that was added to flesh things out for the demo. One of these days I’ll do an article illustrating some basic guidelines for this, but for now all I can say it, “it’s hard to know for sure”.

That’s why it’s such a good deal when you can sign up with a theme provider that gives you access to ALL their themes for one price. If you find a provider whose overall design style you like, then you may have half a dozen of their themes that are potential matches for your project. WordPress allows you to “try out” a theme on your website so easily, and if you don’t like one of them, try another until you find one that works for you.

A $40 or $100 subscription to a theme club is still FAR less expensive than a $2,000-$4,000 custom-designed WordPress website.

Without Further Ado — The Themes

Click on any of the thumbnail screenshots to see a live demo of the theme. Some of the demo’s are even customizable (you can change colors and textures interactively).

Aggregate

Bold

Chameleon

Delicate News

eNews

Glow

TheSource

TheStyle

Who’s Who

Check out the rest of the Elegant Themes collection here:

Full Disclosure: While this may look like some sort of blatant promotion of my Elegant Themes affiliate link, it’s really something else. A friend was asking about magazine-style WordPress themes, and since I have a membership with a top-notch theme club, I looked around the Elegant Themes archives and found nine beautiful magazine themes.

I bought a membership with ET because they make good stuff. Their designs are beautiful to the eye, they’re easy to use, they’re fun to customize. I’m a fan. I’m a customer. And now I’m an affiliate. So if you click my link to them and sign up, I’ll get a commission. As always, I recommend them because they rock, not because they give me money.