Brain Gardner, WordPress theme designer extraordinaire, just announced the release of a new theme specifically targeted to Real Estate Agents.

This theme comes with great features like automatic thumbnail creation and special pages for your real estate listing.

There are separate writing panels for your listings with fields for price and other items pertaining to the property. You write the data, and the theme will handle the layout so that every listing has the same format.

For Google maps code, there is a special field where you only need the location code.

It comes with four different color schemes that give you the ability to use the one that best fits your company. You also get the PSD files, so you can make your own changes or hire AgentPress to do further customization for you.

Different ideas for usage

Although this theme was developed by Brian Gardner together with Nicole Nicolay (of My Tech Opinion) for real estate agents, it looks to me like you can adapt this theme. With a few simple changes, you can make it work for different agents like car dealers, motorcycle companies, and even custom car builders.

In fact, every company that chooses to showcase their products with several photos can benefit by using this theme.

If you want to build a professional website for marketing products in the high end consumer market, the SEO-ready Agent Theme from StudioPress may be just what you need.

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Brian Gardner is showing off the redesign of his Magazine Theme, which is already a classic.

If you look at the new features in the header, you can see why this is going to be a great theme to use for Building a website with WordPress.

The tabs at the top are great for extra pages, and the category links will make it easy to “theme” your site.

In Brian’s post, he also shows the new configuration panel that will make it a lot easier to work with for the not-so-technical WordPress website builders.

With this theme, just like the Thesis theme, there are extra fields in the posting panel to give writers a simpler method for adding images to a post and have them show up in the correct positions.

I suppose that the new automatic thumbnail creation that is now implemented in a lot of  Studiopress themes will also be part of this theme…

To be honest with you, there is one thing I don’t like about this theme…. the colors used for the links and headers. As you can tell from my new Hybrid Top Cars website, I prefer blue!

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I have used two different themes on this site now.  The first was Cutline and the second was Revolution Blue.

Both are very good themes and come well-equipped for a Search Engine Optimized website.

Still, I wanted to have a more Magazine-like template. After looking for one that was created for the WordPress versions 2.7 and up, I found the new Mimbo 3.

A new addition, this free magazine theme was built with the ability to use Child Themes.

Changing the style can be done without touching the theme itself. Just change the child theme and all functions from this theme will be there.

A big advantage of this is that if you have heavily customized the theme via child theme, a new version can be installed and will work without you touching any of the core files.

I know, this is a new way of customizing your design with child themes, but I will be looking into these options very soon.  :-)

My Frontpage is not like the standard Mimbo, since that is really built for a blog page, which this site is not.

How about you? Do you work with WordPress theme frameworks yet, or are you still waiting to see how it evolves?

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I was just thinking about this project of Building a Website with WordPress and the use of a Magazine Style Theme.

As I was working on the manual for the use of that special kind of themes, I suddenly realized that the whole project was not going to work….

You see, if you have a customer that is not as WordPress and Computer savvy as you are, you need to explain how this thing with  ”custom fields” works.
And you need to tell them how to upload and choose the right image, copy the right name and paste it in the right format in the right box…
Before that you need to tell your client that he/she needs to create three images in exactly those three formats because they are needed in that post.

So do you think he/she will go through this kind of proces every time he/she wants to write a post?
If the answer is NO (really big change!) then you need to re-think the use of that kind of WP Templates for a CMS based semi-static page.

Just use a standard WordPress Blog Template and recode that in a way that your customer will be able to write and manage its website in the easiest way possible.
Only then, and really only then the client will be much more likely to work on their own website and let it grow to its real potential.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like Magazine Style CMS Like WordPress themes, but you should not use them for the majority of website owners.

What do you think? Is there a WordPress Magazine style template that is easier for “Normal” people to work with?

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I have been working on this site to provide information on how to build a static website with WordPress.
The Theme I used was Cutline 1.x, but I wanted a better layout more like a magazine.

And now I have found one of the best free ones, although I like the other Revolution that Brain Garder brings to us, I found the price for this new theme better!
No, the templates are great, but I don’t feel the need right now to buy a template for this website, it is still a work in progress, although this site is doing pretty well in the search engines as it comes to the keywords I targeted.

This new theme is a free version that you can get at the Download page for the free Revolution Blog Theme and you can read more about the theme at the Blog from Brain Gardner on The Free Revolution Blog Theme

So I am going to take the next step and bring a new vision and layout to the site, I hope you like it, I know I do.
It’s a new challenge to make this site even more informational.

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