The rise in popularity in news and magazine-style layouts for blogs and sites featuring a heavy rotation of published content shows no signs of slowing down, much less reversing itself, any time soon. If you’re looking for a dynamic, free way to create a news-magazine style content site, check out MH NewsMagazine, aka MH NewsMag, our free child theme for MH Magazine lite.
For the right site, with the right mix, type, and frequency of content, these news-style designs offer some invaluable aid to the site owner and publisher. So it’s probably no surprise that the WordPress community has seen an explosion in growth of WordPress themes promising to do just that. And many of them carry a steep price tag, to boot, reflecting that value.
We’d like to suggest a different approach. Our MH NewsMag child theme, coupled with our free MH Magazine lite parent theme, give you all the essential elements you need to publish a high-profile, high-traffic editorial site — without the steep price tag.
- MH Magazine lite – Popular magazine & news WordPress theme
- Key advantages of MH NewsMag
- MH Magazine – Take your news site to the next level!
MH Magazine lite – Popular magazine & news WordPress theme
First, let’s look at the main theme itself. MH Magazine lite might be free, but it comes with all basic features you need to create a nice news site. It offers a well-crafted news-style layout right out of the box, without the addition of the child theme. Just arrange your preferred layout with widgets!
You can segregate content by category and feature your most compelling content with clear thumbnails of associated images. It also gives you a prime spot on your home page for all kinds of featured ads, as well as any piece of content you’d like to spotlight.
Then, when you install and activate the MH NewsMag child theme, you get a seriously attractive WordPress news-style site, waiting solely for your great content. MH Magazine lite plus MH NewsMag is a winning formula that yields all the benefits of a well-coded news or magazine site for brands on a budget. Therefore, you’ll have a nicely designed news site for free.
Key advantages of MH NewsMag
One of the key advantages of the news editorial layout, which the MH NewsMag theme has in spades, is the structure to organize your content beautifully. First and foremost, you get the crucial news-style categorization of your content, arranged in the classic grid format, so your readers enjoy a clean, crisp layout of your most recent content.
MH NewsMag helps you create a front page jam-packed with teaser excerpts, compelling graphics, and your click-enticing headlines to persuade readers to browse deep through your site. MH NewsMag also overlays that take-us-seriously aesthetic on top of the solid content management code of WordPress and our MH Magazine lite theme. It features that dark text/light background newspaper look that evokes newsprint, and adds a little gravitas to your site — instant credibility.
That’s probably the biggest benefit offered by news and magazine style WordPress themes, we think. Credible press and media outlets may be under fire from some political corners, but the big league outlets get taken seriously enough to generate mega-views and a devoted readership. When it’s coupled with well-crafted, authoritative content, the traditional grid-based layout that echoes newspaper design lends an air of expertise and respectability to your site.
Is MH NewsMag right for you? Well, as is true for most news/magazine layout themes, it will generally offer the greatest benefit when the following conditions exist for your blog or site:
- A large, significant body of content to showcase on your website.
- A fairly consistent publishing schedule so that you’ll have a steady stream of new content to rotate out on your front page. This also helps to attract returning visitors.
- Meatier, in-depth, data-driven articles that you’d like to feature more prominently than the average piece of content on your blog or website.
- Well-defined categories or sections that are roughly equally populated with content.
MH NewsMag is a great choice for dynamic, fast-evolving topics such as politics, current events, national/international news, entertainment, and business/economy niches or topics.
MH Magazine – Take your news site to the next level!
What if you’d rather not mess around with a child theme? MH Themes has you covered here, too. You can get the same kind of design and all the benefits of MH NewsMag plus MH Magazine lite with our premium MH Magazine theme. This WordPress theme is ideal for professional editorial websites.
MH Magazine WordPress theme is our full-featured premium news and magazine theme that lets you build the content-driven, image-anchored publishing site of your dreams — without messing around with a child theme. We’ve crafted MH Magazine, our flagship theme, with an eye towards stability, speed, and range of customization. Its features allow a pretty unprecedented level of flexibility:
- Advertisement containers maximized for greatest visibility potential to help avoid banner blindness and optimize your online revenue.
- Content slider to make the fullest possible use of your digital real estate.
- Drag and drop widgets to make crafting your homepage just the way you want it a snap.
- Social-ready space to help you connect with your audience on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and more, and maximize social shares on those major networks.
- Most crucially, mobile-ready and SEO optimized to take full advantage of Google’s new emphasis on responsiveness for the ever-increasing percentage of your audience that uses mobile devices to access your content.
MH Magazine also cleverly lets you choose the layout style that works best for your niche, content, and brand: magazine-style or newspaper-style. If that changes next year, you can change without changing your WordPress theme. Just make use of the built-in features, options and custom widgets.
You can configure the MH Magazine WordPress theme in even more ways with its flexible layout options. It features tools such as more widget areas, multiple custom widgets, and extended layout, typography, and color scheme configuration options. This means you can get the site of your dreams through fine-tuned controls, without having to dive deep into the code. Here’s one demo of the MH Magazine theme in magazine-style editorial mode as food magazine:
We’ve created plenty of theme demos for MH Magazine to show what is possible with this flexible magazine & news WordPress theme. Here’s another MH Magazine demo that uses the newspaper approach to cover current events and politics:
Conclusion: Start your own news magazine or newspaper WordPress site
Whatever your budget, whatever your plans for your news-style editorial site, MH Themes has a product for you. If you’re on a budget, or would rather use a child theme, check out MH Magazine lite plus MH NewsMag. They’re free to use and easy to set up. You can be publishing a gorgeous, robust news site in an hour. And if you’d rather avoid the child theme route, check out MH Magazine, our premium full-featured WordPress theme that offers both news and magazine-style layout options.
image sources
- Planning / Research: Pexels / Pixabay.com
- Working with notebook: StartupStockPhotos / Pixabay.com