Really obsessed with the idea to create an online magazine, but you’re not exactly sure how to go about doing that? This post is just about that. You’ll learn what features you definitely need for your online magazine design so that it looks and works as your readers expect. What’s more, I’ll review a sample WordPress design that we’ll have all the features that you’ll find mentioned in the post. As a matter of fact, there are two ways to go about it. You can either just use a specific online magazine platform that allows you to get your site off the ground really fast or actually use WordPress. Both options have both cons and pros…
Online Magazine Must-Have Features
For starters, you need to figure out what features you want to have in your online magazine. It can strongly depend on the time of magazine you’re about to create, but the following requirements fit the bill for the most part:
Easy Customization
Even if you start a blog with a design that pretty much has everything you want, you’ll most def will need to edit all sorts of things, from small to big. That means you need to make sure in the very beginning that you’ll be able to edit just about everything in your WordPress theme. It goes without saying that highly configurable themes are gem, but you need to have .PSD files as well. That’s because it’s the only way to ensure that you have complete control over the look and feel of your site. Just to name a few, you’ll definitely want to edit your logo, favicon and stuff like that.
It also helps if your WordPress theme comes with commented and formatted source code. Other than that, extensive documentation is a sign of a high quality design. And if tech support is also included in the prices of your WordPress theme, rest assured that you’ll be able to modify your WordPress theme as you see fit.
Categories, sections and pages
Any magazine (both online and offline) has a slew of pages, sections and things along those lines. That means you need to make sure that your CMS or theme don’t have restrictions in terms of how many pages or categories you can add. Even if they say that you can as many as you wish, you still need to check how it will influence your design. Because, say, adding a lot of pages and displaying links to all of them in your menu can make it really clumsy and cumbersome. In case you like plain English, it’ll look like crap. So, if there’s a way to test drive your design before you actually buy it, be advised to make us of that chance.
Sliders
Nowadays, it’s pretty standard that your site (especially an on-line magazine site) should have the ability to display featured articles with images in slideshows. If your theme comes with that feature, you’ll be able to manage your sliders from the convenience of your WordPress dashboard.
Author pages
Since you’ll most likely have a few authors that contribute to your online magazine, you need pages to display their bios and the content they created. That’s why you want your WordPress magazine theme to come with the author pages option. As a matter of fact, WordPress has this feature by default, but you want it to be tailored specifically for the needs of an online magazine authors.
Social Media Icons
In our day and age, you just can’t afford running a site without social media features because you’ll miss out on the opportunity to make your content go viral. Plus your readers will just consider that really weird. There’s just one specific caveat that you need to bear in mind at all times. Though you totally need social media icons on your site, don’t add way too many of them because it’ll just confuse your readers.
Category Colors
If your theme supports this feature, you’ll be able to use different color styles for different content types. For example, politics-related articles will have a red stripe at the top and sports related ones will have a blue one. That allows your readers to easily spot the type of content they’re interested in.
News Ticker
That’s another feature that is useful specifically for online magazine and news sites. You may use it to make it possible for your visitors to learn about the main events or news at a glance. Be sure to ask your pre-sales guy if your theme support that sort of functionality because hardly any themes actually do. Really high-quality ones for the most part.
Multi-Level Drop-Down Menu
You need this feature as well because you’ll be able to house a lot of different types of content if you have the option to create menus and sub-menus with corresponding pages and categories. Other than being able to do that, double-check if you can use long titles for your menu and submenu button names. Many designers and coders don’t really take that into account.
Ads Blocks
Having an ads system incorporated in your WordPress theme is a very crucial aspect. That’s because otherwise the ads (banners) you can to your site will look really wacky on your site and you’ll be able to easily see that they just don’t belong there. In case your theme was created with the idea of banners integrated in the overall design, you’ll be able to run banners ads on your site ina really hassle free way.
Newsletter
You may be surprised how often people forget to set up a newsletter on their sites. It’s really ironic because it’s the most surefire way to bring people back to your site so that they check new stuff or actually buy something from you. With that said, you need to ask and check if your WordPress theme has this feature integrated. On a side note, you should set up your newsletter sign-up form first of all. As a rule of thumb, it’s best to do it right after you’ve applied your new theme. Doing so allows you to grow your newsletter database right away.
Responsive
In case you’re not in the know, responsive designs adapt to the size of the screen that’s in the device that your visitor uses for accessing your site. Other than just making your site really user friendly, it’s also beneficial in terms of SEO because you won’t have to promote a few versions of your site. You’ll just have to build links to one site. It means the whole process will be way faster and your overall SEO profile will be way stronger.
In case you want to ensure that people can conveniently access your site on all sorts of devices, you absolutely need to make sure that your theme is a responsive one. As a rule of thumb, such themes are a bit more expensive, but they are really worth it because using a responsive WordPress theme is a future-proof approach that will allow you to set up everything once and just forget about it because your site will just adapt to virtually any screen resolution out there.
Shortcodes
Shortcodes are basically small codes that allow you to quickly add all sorts of functionality and design elements to your theme, such as icons, forms, players. The list may go on an on. It strongly depends on a specific theme. You need to make check that your design has an extensive collection of short codes because you’ll be able to add lots of extra features just by copying and pasting them.
Secure Contact Forms with reCAPCTHA
Feedback is important for any sort of sites. That said, you also don’t want to wade through tons of spam either. So, you contact form should accept only genuine feedback from live humans. Otherwise instead of creating awesome content for your site (or whatever you’re doing for your site), you’ll be just deleting comments in the dashboard.
Translation Ready
In case you want to go worldwide, you’ll need to localize your theme for your target audience. That means theme translation for the most part. If the theme you use is a translation ready one, you’ll be able to translate a few specific files and you’re good to go. Keep in mind that we’re talking about actual theme translation but not your posts or pages. You’ll have to do it extra. But it gets as good as that.
Featured Video
Being able to easily add a video to your site is a great thing as well. And if you can add a featured video on your homepage, it makes your online magazine look really professional. For the most part, if this functionality is available, it’s displayed on the homepage in design screen shots. If it’s not the case, make sure to ask this question before you go any further with purchasing your WordPress theme.
SEO Optimised
You may take it for granted that premium WordPress themes are optimized for SEO. In reality, it’s usually not the case. What’s more, the default WorPress 2012 theme is not completely SEO optimized either. With that in mind, be sure to test your theme before investing anything into it. As a matter of fact, that sorts of drawbacks are visible theme demo pages. You may just use the default Google Chrome “Inspect Element” feature to see if, for example, the heading of your blog post is H1 on the post page. Alternatively, you may want to use Firebug for the same purpose.
Cross Browser Compatible
And last but not least. Your WordPress magazine theme should cross browser compatible. That means it should look decent and similar on most major browsers, which nowadays are:
Internet Explorer
Google Chrome
Mozilla Firefox
Safari
Opera
How to Make a Magazine Online
Sure thing, there are a few ways to make a magazine online without installing anything. Problem is, you don’t have access to all the elements you may need to change in your site. Having said that, your best option would be to install WordPress (or have it installed) and you’ll be able to run your online magazine and change whatever you wish to.
Should you still decide to make a magazine on a platform, you should check the The top 10 ways to create digital magazines post from netmagazine.com. The author of the post is Martha Rotter and she meticulously offers you both the cons and pros for consideration. It’s a must-read if I have not convinced you to use WordPress for your online magazine.
Conclusion
WordPress has evolved enough for using it as a CMS for an online magazine and not only. Though there are lots of default features that come out of the box with your WordPress installation, you still need to make sure that your theme supports all the features that you need. It’s always better to ask beforehand than shelling out down the line.
Chances are, I still left out some must-have features. Do you have something to add to the list of features that a WordPress theme for an online magazine should definitely have?
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