Pro Blog Design

Yamidoo Magazine is a premium WordPress theme recently released by Pavel Ciorici of WP Zoom. It’s entering a tough market, but it does a lot of things well. Things that we can learn from!

You can see a live demo of the theme in action here.

This review was sponsored by Pavel, but it has been written in the exact same way as all my other design reviews. There is a competition to win a free license at the end of the post, and if you’d like to purchase the theme for your own site, you can do so here.

Now, onto the review!

What Has Been Done Well?

• Faint colors to set it apart. There are a lot of newspaper-style magazine themes for WordPress already. They tend to be white with various black/gray boarders.

  Yamidoo uses pale shades of red and yellow in its backgrounds, and blue for the links. There’s a lot more color than most newspaper themes give.

• Large navigation bar. The navigation bar is the first thing that hits me about the site. With a well chosen set of categories, you could summarize your site and get visitors clicking very clicking.
• Category page layout. The category pages themselves are very well laid out. Have a look at one here. The boxes for each post, the post images and the title are all put together in a way that just seems to work. The result is easy to scan over and looks great aesthetically.
• Uses for post images. Post images are used in the usual places on the home page and category pages (A little thumbnail near the header).

  But on the home page these thumbnails are also links to the post, and more importantly on the posts themselves, the full size image is actually set into the sidebar. It’s a pretty unique effect that might appeal to you.

What Could be Done Differently?

• RSS made more prominent. As a blogger, I think that RSS is the most important aspect of your blog to promote. You want people to subscribe and keep coming back again and again.

  The options here are limited to very small links in the header and after a post. The largest promotion for it is hidden away down in the footer.

• Tighter comment design. The comments are threaded, use Gravatars, and have trackbacks already separated out for you. The functionality there is great, but when you look at them, there seems to be an awful lot of empty space.

  The rest of the design is very tightly put together, I’d love to see the comments match this.

• Post content header. The typography in the design is very well set for the most part. I just have a small niggle with the start of the posts. There just isn’t enough difference between the post title, meta information and the start of the post.

  Perhaps putting the title and meta details a little closer together, or drawing some sort of separator would fix this?

Conclusion

There are a lot of newspaper themes out there already, but Yamidoo is very well put together, packs in a lot of functionality and the colors give it that little spark that many of the current newspaper designs are missing.

What do you think of it?

Competition – Win a Free Copy of Yamidoo!

Pavel has kindly offered a free license to his theme to one lucky user of the site. To enter the draw, just answer this question in a comment; What is your favorite news website? (Of any kind!)

It can be a WordPress theme of course, but it can also be a regular news site like CNN or the BBC, or even a blog like the Huffington post! Any news site that you think looks great!

The winner will be chosen this Friday (3 days from now!) and I’ll be in touch with the winner over email come then.

Thanks for joining in, I’m curious to see what everyone chooses!