We know there are numerous paid and free WordPress magazine themes available out there, however they come in varying levels of quality. The demand for high quality magazine-style WordPress themes from our users is still very high last years and, we predict, still will be in 2012. We asked Monika Halim to make us a design and handed it over to the developers to create yet another feature-rich WordPress theme.

Introducing the Neu theme, a magazine WordPress theme for customers looking for a complete web standards compliant theme and one that will set their websites apart from their competitors. Neu is perfectly capable on handling and displaying a lot of content in a way that pleased the readers’ eyes, make it almost suitable to any type of web publishing, from commercialized blogs by a team of writers to news websites with an organized editorial team.

Let’s look at the front page of the Neu theme.

As a magazine-style theme, Neu offers good usability, clean typography, and professional interface. We chose white background for Neu which is for better content readability. The contents are grouped into one column, just like a blog, to keep them well-spaced and noticeable and its placement is adjustable, but we’ll get into that later.

Horizontal navigation on the top-most part of the page, just above the header will act as primary navigation. But with many collection of contents, it’s just logical to provide a vertical category-based navigation so visitors can find and read what they really care about.

Page Layout and Feature Posts Options

The homepage features a 3-column and you can alter the composition to your liking. Choose where you want to place your content: left-side or center-column.

With many contents posted on a news websites, we put featured posts section on Neu. Perfect to highlight the Latest News or Headlines to inform visitors and users on what the newly published articles on the website are. You can choose how you’d like to display your featured posts, one big thumbnail with a short column of small thumbnails or a row of small thumbnails.

You can do both content and featured posts settings, including many design settings, directly on the Theme Options. The ColorLabs options panel is very user friendly and extremely over the top, giving you almost unlimited flexibility without without the need to touch any code.

Tabbed Content Areas

With a dedicated team of writers, news website add contents very quickly and frequently, so showing links to articles that are currently popular is also an important part of usability. Neu uses a tabbed content area in the sidebar to show the most popular articles, recent articles, and the latest comments submitted by readers. This method is a great way to inform your readers on which are the most clicked without taking too much space.

Social Media Integration

The impact of social media on sending traffic to a website is now widely recognized. Encourage your visitor to follow you on online social platforms. You can easily manage your social networks and make the most of them so your friends can follow you on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, etc.

Custom Widgets and Widget Areas

We provide Neu with lots of custom widgets and widget areas. This way you have many opportunities to customize your content display and add/remove your favorite sections.

View Live Demo and Purchase

View Live Demo of the theme and head over to landing page of the Neu magazine theme to check all the awesome features of this theme and once you like it, purchase it.

What’s Next?

We are working on a blog and a newspaper-style theme. Here’s a tiny sneak peek.