Design Review: Yamidoo Magazine
50Yamidoo 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!
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I get news from my friends @ http://plurk.com/ . ;)
My favorite news site is http://www.smashingmagazine.com
twitter.
I actually check CNN a lot. But being in the entertainment field, I also frequent IMDB, Variety, etc.
i go with bbc, they not become the best redesign of the year for nothing right.
http://www.netvibes.com
Love http://www.nytimes.com best ever!!
Nice color balance on theme, indded setis it apart from usual magazine ones that look almost generic already.
On best news site – tough choice because I get all of my daily reading in RSS. I guess Twitter – at least I visit that one. :)
Definitely CNN. I am in love with the layout.
MSNBC’s layout sucks, in my opinion.
Twitter brings news faster, so I like that too. :)
I love the NY Times … only on my iPhone though. Great way to catch up while waiting around.
My favorite news site is Google News
I check The Huffington Post all the time
I get most of my news from my iGoogle page. Pocket Express on my Blackberry is another favorite.
Thanks for the answers so far everyone, keep them coming! :D
I hadn’t even thought of Twitter etc. or iGoogle when I thought of that question, that was great to see! I suppose it’s very true, I get more of my headlines from Twitter than from anywhere else now too, though I still wouldn’t have thought of that. xD
I use iGoogle also… but the best since im a finance geek.. best news website is http://portfolio.com or any CondeNet websites… their websites are very stylish! I like the Yamidoo theme also.. would love to implement it.. one of the best ones seen so far..
CNN.com and Lifehacker
I actually check espnstar.com for spots news.
My favorite news site is WSJ (India edition) – http://asia.wsj.com/home-page
and ofcourse Cricinfo (http://www.cricinfo.com)
I use my iGoogle page, where I read over 30 websites’ feeds :)
I find myself on CNN.com several times a day. The ugly but utilitarian Drudge Report’s a close second.
http://news.bbc.co.uk – because I’m English. :)
Not wanting to get political but it makes me happy to cut myself off from CNN/ABC/MSNBC. My world is a shinier place since I stopped watching US news.
Anyhow, I love this design (much better than the last paid review). If it was me I’d have someone alter the header area a bit more to add a nice logo and pimp the RSS a bit more. I love the clicky /slidy thing. :D
As an American, I definitely second your comment about American news. That’s why I love Google News, I can read a newspaper in the country about where the news is, not the American interpretation of it. Have a jolly good day!
My rss feed reader has massive amounts of news sites, but BoingBoing.net has to be my favourite News Blog. Gotta love the daily dose of IRL articles as well as Internet news.
I like News.com CNETs tech news site. By the way great review and tight theme by Pavel.
My Netnewswire rss feed – igoogle and my.yahoo
I like to use Wikio (http://www.wikio.com) to read my news, it is a multisourced news site, it has well over one hundred sources. It does take a little time to configure your favourite news sources at the beginning, but once done I think it is the best site to follow news.
Google News is ugly but good. :)
Well
I like these two –
http://www.jswconline.org/
http://magazine.wsj.com/
And Crazy for getting wordpress themes used by them.
Neat theme, Michael. Thanks for highlighting it!
I like to get my news from http://drudgereport.com
I check the Huff Post several times a day.
I love the use of post pics in this theme. It can attract people to read posts they’d never read otherwise.
yap :)
its nice design
My Favorite News Website Is http://news.google.com
This is really a wonderful theme, I also promote it, and selling started to roll on
Nice themes
Free Blogger Templates’s Latest Post: Red Carpet Magazine – Free Premium WordPress Theme
very nice balanced color theme.
i like it.
cheers!
need idea to develop Thesis theme like this.. :D
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I always love themes reviewed by your blog.
Nice review, for website with news in their content. So, more of navigation channels.
its nice design
I have visited the sight and I found out that it really have a great design. I really like its navigation bar and its comment section it was really great. Nice review, congrats!
Elegant design. Not over flooded with unnecessary columns etc.
The compact comment box suits the design.. ++
Is a really great tool but is not very well understood by most people and I think even us developers are only just beginning to get to grips with what we can do with it
Wow, I thought DrudgeReport was a spoof site at first but people can actually navigate it??
The theme that they had made is nice and attractive even with a simple design. The review is very well said and shared.
My favoriate news site for Music news is, http://www.strummagazine. I own it haha. I like this word press theme though better than my joomla.
Thanks for the info,,, I love it
A nice theme there and I think that there are some really good points there when you look at the theme more closely and start criticizing there are things you pick up on rather than just looking at the overall design and giving a vague thought about it. To be able to look at someone elses design and give feedback on it means you should be able to take a step back and hopefully do this to your own work.
I enjoyed reading this article!
There are actually a number of details like that to take into consideration. That could be a great point to deliver.
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