Mimbo Pro started life as an imaginary men’s magazine site used as an example in a tutorial about how to use Wordpress to publish magazine-style websites. But the demand from readers meant the theme had to become a reality.

Then, a pro version of the theme, taking it to a whole new level, was developed. The result is a very professional layout suited to any style of magazine-style website. It includes featured posts with images, ad spaces and stylish drop-down navigation for subcategories.

The theme includes a lot of features you won’t find included in free themes and even in most premium themes that give the site owner a lot of control and flexibility without the need to know a lot about coding.

Pros:

• A control panel allows site producers to control all aspects of the site without the need to edit the templates manually
• The theme includes a contact form with control panel options
• There are custom templates for: search results, date archives, sitemap, contact, author archives and category archives
• Google Analytics, Feedburner and simple advertising options are included in the control panel
• A custom script automatically crops and resizes images so you don’t need to create two or three versions of each image
• Single post pages are rendered in a printer friendly format.

Cons:

• Nothing of note.

Cost

The Mimbo Pro theme costs $US89.99 for a single site or $US199.99 for a multi-site licence.

Demo and download:

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Upstart Blogger Minim is a minimalist, fast-loading, ad-friendly blue-and-white Wordpress theme.

It features a widish left column that houses the header image and whatever else you want via Widgets.

The main column on the right has headlines in all-caps with large tags and nice white space to separate the stories.

Pros:

• Simple, stylish design
• Widget ready
• Ad friendly, with columns the right size for ad units
• Quick to load

Cons:

• Nothing of note.

Demo and download:

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Beautiful Day 2.0 is simple but indeed beautiful. With soft yet bright colours and a classy horizontal page navigation bar, it’s an attractive two-column theme following a standard blog style.

Pros:

• Attractive theme
• Simple blog-style layout
• Useful for personal or more professional blogs
• Adaptable

Cons:

• Nothing of note.

Demo and download:

Demo
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K2 is more of an advanced framework rather than just a Wordpress theme. It also has to qualify as having by far the longest development timeframe of any Wordpress theme.

Originally the brainchild of Kubrick developer Michael Heilemann, K2 is now something much bigger: a project with a number of contributors and a significant infrastructure behind it.

Out of the box, K2 is a simple and stylish two-column theme with a blue header. For more advanced users, it opens up a whole world of hacking that allows K2 to look like almost anything you want it to.

Pros:

• Prepackaged support for some of the most widely used plugins
• Simple styling with alternative style sheet
• Live commenting
• Live search
• Rolling archives
• Sidebar modules - Widgets on steroids

Cons:

• There aren’t too many, really, although personally I’d like to see more white space between the columns and a slightly slimmer main text column.

Demo and download:

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The Minyx 2.0 Lite theme has contemporary stylings and a gorgeous implementation of horizontal page navigation and a wide sidebar that could easily accommodate some advertising if that’s what you’re looking for.

The free Lite version of this theme doesn’t support Widgets or other extras, but there is a pro version for sale ($60) that rolls in Widget, Flickr, del.icio.us and Adsense integration, as well as a control panel for playing with the theme.

Pros:

• Very modern, stylish Wordpress theme

Cons:

• At first glance at the author’s site, the theme will look like it’s all in Spanish. But the good news is there’s really very little work to make the theme work in English.
• The free version lacks support for Widgets etc. which is a shame.

Demo and download:

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The Salmon Wordpress theme by Justin Shattock has pro written all over it, from the blue-and-pink colour scheme to the Web 2.0-ish layout.

All the small details are covered and it’s a very attractive theme.

Pros:

• Professional look with rounded corners and a Web 2.0 feel
• Unique colour palette makes the design sing

Cons:

• You’ll need to do some tweaking by hand, as Justin says himself, to get your own content in instead of Justin’s. This means editing the sidebar.php and header.php files.

Demo and download:

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By default, Day Dream is a blue-and-white, one-column Wordpress theme with a large header. However, it doesn’t have to be blue. It has a neat admin screen where you can choose from four colours, among some other customisation options. There’s a page navigation bar above the fold and weblog categories and archives at the bottom of the template.

Pros:

• Very clean, minimalist design
• Easily customisable through a built-in options page
• Neat typography and easy to read
• Widget-ready
• Built-in support for Asides
• Built-in support for Gravatars

Cons:

• Search bar appears only at the bottom of the page.

Demo and download:

Demo
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