Magazine Style Theme – The Pros & Cons
Before deciding on a magazine style theme lets take a quick look at the pro’s & con’s, to see if a magazine style theme has any advatages over the standard layouts.
I have been asked the same question several times, “which is the best..?” Therefore I have decided the time has come for me to offer my views on this subject and maybe also some answers!
Ultimately choosing a theme or style of theme, is obviously a very personal choice, after all you are the one that will spend the most time looking at your masterpiece and therefore above all else it should satisfy you before any other considerations are taken into account.
Standard Layout Themes
Very often your standard layout themes are much easier to work with, especially when it comes to the creation & insertion of thumbnail images. In most cases you will only deal with the one size of thumbnail throughout your theme & therefore it can be a lot simpler to setup or even to deal with any issues should they occur.
Having said that, there is, as far as I am concerned a few major drawbacks to the standard layout themes;
1. Greatly reduced options for placing adverts.
2. Because of the way that a standard theme operates & displays the posts / articles, I have found that it can often happen that you accidentally change the focus of your site, simply by focusing too much on one particular category.
3. In most cases a busy site will only display a new article for around 10 days if the author posts 1 article per day & on a site that may only get crawled once a fortnight it can mean there is a chance of the article disappearing from your home page without ever being seen by the search engines. Obviously the search engines will still pick up this article in it’s own right, however it will no longer help to support the overall theme of your homepage.
Magazine Style Layout Themes
Now you can see quite easily where my preferences lie, but let me try to explain some of my reasoning why..?
Although some magazine style themes are renowned for difficulty in getting thumbnails displaying correctly, there are certain advantages I feel, that outweigh the occasional image problems.
1. Keep the thought at the back of your mind, that a standard theme will usually display 10 articles from whichever categories were last written to. Now my own theme on My Blog Review is quite obviously a magazine style theme & as such it can display 5 posts from mixed categories in the featured block at the top of the page.
2. There are then 2 columns left & right which can each display 4 blocks / boxes, each one being assigned to a particular category, in addition to this there are also a further 2 boxes called bottom boxes which display a larger image than the other 8 boxes above, these are also assigned their own categories.
3. Now with the best will in the world, you cannot help but slightly alter the theme of your home page due to your focus on a particular topic, lets say for example “WP Plugins”, I’ll bet your not quite seeing where this is going yet, so let me explain in more detail.
On a standard layout theme, if you were to focus on a particular topic such as “WP Plugins“ and write 5 articles all to do with various WP Plugins, then you end up with 5 of the 10 articles shown on your home page that are themed around WP Plugins, this can and often does affect your ranking, why..? Quite simply because lets say your site like mine, deals with Themes, Plugins, SEO Tips, Graphics etc, then you will have drastically altered your keyword density for everything on your home page and in severe cases you will find that you lose ranking because your site is seen as no longer relevant to some of the categories that it once was !
This is one big drawback with your standard layout themes & one I am pleased to say does not occur with a magazine style theme. Why..? Well as I previously mentioned each box / block in a magazine style theme is usually assigned a category and therefore if I wrote 10 articles one after the other on “WP-Plugins” I would only ever have 1 article on this subject showing on the home page, because each new article in any particular category will automatically hide the previous article in that category.
This makes it much easier to keep a good overall spread of subject matter on your home page and as such it also helps to keep your keyword density nicely balanced. Also should I notice a particular subject is drawing quite a bit of traffic, then I can safely focus on that subject without affecting the overall theme of my site. So there we have it, there are actually hidden SEO benefits to using a good magazine style theme on your site! Something that few people even realise 
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Posted by Steve Nickson
on Oct 7 2011. Filed under Wordpress Themes.
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