A month or two ago, when i was searching for Magazine-style wordpress themes, i found none. But, today, after just a short time, there are 6 magazine-style wordpress theme available. Three of them are free and three of them are paid. In the upcoming posts, i’ll cover the various aspects of these themes. I’ll split this into three posts and will post in the upcoming days.
As of now, i’ll post the list of them. I’ve ranked them in terms of look, feature, quality and others.
- The Morning After – Free
- Revolution News Theme – Paid – (wanted to rank this the same as “The Morning After”. But “The Morning After” won over because it is Free)
- Mimbo Magazine Theme – Free
- Block Magazine – Paid
- Your Revolution – Paid
- Jello Wala Mello – Free
I’d like to tell that, the ranking mentioned in this post is in no way influenced by my previous post. I’ll write more about these themes in my upcoming posts.
Last week, Small Potato from WPDesigner posted a review about Nate Whitehill’s Unique Blog Designs. All the points that he made are very true. In fact, thats what i had felt about them. Even normal Wordpress Design companies do Unique designs. But, having the word “Unique” in their name, UBD doesn’t do Unique themes. Check out these sites designed by UBD :
Do you think they are Unique ? Of course, they aren’t. They are just small variations of each other. So are they worth $799 ? Definitely they aren’t. Even i’m a wordpress theme designer and i know how much custom themes are worth. I do unique custom themes from $200. But i just don’t do it like UBD because i don’t have enough free time. I just do some freelancing.
Coming back to Small Potato’s review, i’d support his review 100%. He has wrote what he had thought and there is nothing wrong in it. I don’t like the way Adii has responded in the comments. Every blogger has every right to publish anything in his blog. I experienced the same when i wrote negative reviews (here & here) on my Contest Blog.
The comments section of the post is really interesting. There is very interesting conversation between Adii and SP.
Also, as SP points out, the UBD themes are not of good quality. The are, of course, Poorly made gradients. For eg, check out Darin.cc. It reminds me of designs i used to create when i was 14 years old. Childish. To finish off, what Small Potato did is nothing wrong. And Unique Blog Designs does have to change this. They need to be unique. I wouldn’t be wasting my $800 for a copy-cat-like theme.
Google is undisputedly my favorite company ever. I was excited when i read about two cool news about the Google.
1) GPhone is coming
TechCrunch pointed out to a news article on Rediff, that mentions that the Google Phone (GPhone) might be out in a fortnight. The article also states that Google is in talks with a couple of Indian mobile service providers, which is absolutely fantastic. And, for this reason, GPhone may hit India before iPhone does and will be more popular than iPhone among Indians. This is what makes Google different. They see India as a potential market, whereas the others don’t.
2) Orkut ReDesign
This one is more official than the GPhone article. The orkut blog announced today that there is a redesign under the works. They will be releasing it to groups of users in the coming weeks. This is awesome too. As everyone knows, Orkut is the most popular social network in India and Brazil and i’m a fan of it too. But, why ? It has a more of an Indian touch. I don’t know how else to explain.
This redesign is definitely going to be a successful one. So far, the comments about the design are positive.
UPDATE : Google Discovery has more pictures of the new design. Vinay claims thats the new design has been enabled for him. He has some screenshots on Flickr. Can’t wait to have it on my account.
Over the past comments, i heard a lot of positive comments on this blog’s design. I also heard that it was too simple. I felt the same too. So, i decided to do a redesign. But, this blog is too new for a redesign. So, why not a partial redesign instead of a complete one. And now it is here. The main change is speed. I removed a lot of big images and the Stripes background so that the blog can load faster. Also, this new version of GotChance has a new and better top menu. I have added another sidebar. One contains the usual links and stuff. The new sidebar contains the sponsors links. If you’d like your banner to be added too, you can contact me to know about the price and other details.
If you have any comments or suggestions on the new design, feel free to share them with me.
