As someone who has worked with Wordpress content management system for years now, it has been a privilege to see how Wordpress has evolved to the most dominant blogging platform around the globe. But what makes Wordpress different from other blogging platforms is that there are so many themes available on the Internet that allow you to run all kinds of websites.

Perhaps the most popular types of websites run on Wordpress are magazine websites. You simply don’t have to spend a fortune to design and run a magazine website these days. You pay $0 for Wordpress and with a minimal investment in the right magazine theme, you can start and run your very own attractive site for under $200. You may ask, “how do I right the find theme for my business?” After all, there are so many options available (free and paid), and you don’t want to choose the wrong Wordpress theme to realize down the road that you have made the wrong choice.

When planning your own magazine site, you need to think long term. Think of adopting/buying theme as a long-term business investment. And just like any business investment, you should go about it diligently. Here is how you can find the best magazine Wordpress themes for your business and avoid a major disaster down the road:

• Plan: always plan before starting a new website. It’s really a simple notion, but many people jump the gun too soon and throw something up on the Internet, assuming that if they put it up there it will work out fine. You need to ask yourself some serious questions before adopting your magazine theme. What are you trying to accomplish? Are you going to have a professional magazine site or is it going to be a part-time gig? What content will you be showing on your magazine theme? How would you like to present your content on your theme? Do you want to show video, audio, images, and pdf content on your site? Do you want to monetize your site? Will you be showing ads? These are the questions that you need to answer before going about choosing the right Wordpress theme.

• Design: By now, you should realize what you want to do with your site. In essence, you need to have a vision of where you want to get. The design process is all about giving yourself the chance to meet your vision down the road. You need figure out what type of color you prefer for your site. Also, do you want to show content in 2 columns or three columns on your theme? You also would want to figure out what plugins you need to use to provide the best value to your users. For instance, you want to use SEO plugins to get ranked highly on the Internet. Since your magazine website will have many images and video content, you want to make sure you download a set of plugins that allow you to tag content easily. You may want to consider syndicating your content. This is all part of the design process. You need to figure out whom your customers are and what you need to provide to get them to follow your site for a long time to come.

• Analyze: once you know exactly what you will be doing with your website, it’s time to go out and check a few Wordpress theme directories for your top 5 choices. Keep it down to five so you can thoroughly analyze each theme against the others to find out the limitations and strengths of all these themes. You want your theme to be scalable. You also want to make sure your Wordpress theme is fresh and does not use deprecated PHP function calls that can break your code with future upgrades. In addition, you want to make sure that your theme allows you to make changes in the future without too much hassle. Finally, your theme should be SEO friendly and W3C compliant (if possible). Now here is one thing to keep in mind: you absolutely do want to consider premium themes as well as free themes. The good thing about premium themes is that you get somewhat of a unique theme for a fraction of a custom-designed Wordpress theme. A lot of people don’t want to pay anything to start their website. You should definitely use that to your advantage. Also, keep an eye on new technologies. There are many cool new themes that come out everyday. Some of them are outside the box. You should definitely check them out before choosing your theme.

Finding the right magazine Wordpress theme may look daunting on the paper, but think of the time you spend finding the right theme as an investment in your business or hobby that can turn into a business down the line. It’s OK to think out side the box when approaching this whole process, but whatever you do, do NOT fast forward the process, and you’ll save yourself a lot of headache in the future.