BlueMag is the first Magazine style Wordpress theme developed by me. I am happily announce the release of it and i hope Wordpress users who want to create Magazine style will like it.

BlueMag, as the theme’s name, is a Magazine style Wordpress theme with a blue color scheme. There is a “featured category content slider” at the top of the page. By default, the theme will show three featured posts. You can modify it by opening the header.php and look for $featured_cat = ‘1′. Replace the ‘1′ with your featured category ID.

Below is the summary of features:-

• Featured content slider (can easily turn off if you don’t want to use it).
• 3 level menu.
• Automatically insert post thumbnail, or manually using custom field.
• Fast loading speed. No images are being used, unless the advertisement at your left sidebar and the feed icon.
• 2 sidebars.
• Grid based design.
• Gravatar on comments.
• Search Engine Optimized.
• Work with Wordpress 2.6 and above.

Although BlueMag doesn’t require any plugin, but it comes support for WP-PageNavi. I had include a css file called “wp-pagenavi.css” under “library/css“, which you can customized your WP-PageNavi plugin.

Download | Demo

Many people love Wordpress because There are a lot of plugins that can help Wordpress users customize their website to meet their won needs. Cory Miller had published an article and discuss about why he loves Wordpress.

In his Cory’s artile, he mentioned that Google loves Wordpress. Although Wordpress comes with some basic SEO features such as including the ability to use .htaccess to create apparently static URLs called permalinks, blogrolling, and pinging, but the most important thing that you must do is make sure your Wordpress theme is optimized for search engine. You may get a very low ranking if you choose the wrong Wordpress theme.

So, if you are Wordpress theme developer, you need to make sure your themes are optimized for search enigne. Nathan Rice had wrote a series of guide to WordPress theme SEO, which i will like to recommend for all theme developers (It is worth to read even you are not theme developer).

Nathan had divided the series into different topics:

• Generating a sitemap for Google
• Getting your site indexed by Google
• Getting Google to index and follow the right stuff
• Using Keyword-Rich Permalinks
• Optimizing your <title>
• Optimizing your header tags
• Using META descriptions
• Using META keywords
• Keyword Density
• Deep Linking