BigNews theme gives you full control over your media empire. Your site can be online within a few minutes. Control every aspect of your site from a comfortable options page in your wp-admin. Drop in some advertising, change the colors and design elements of your site according to the seasons or link to your favorite social networks from your site’s navigation bar.

Features:

  • Easy installation and setup – A comprehensive PDF and video tutorials to visualize certain topics help you get the most out of the BigNews theme.
  • RichWP is famous for one-on-one, easily available, fast reacting support. I do not take your money and run.
  • Extensive Theme Options Page (see below for details)
  • Page Template Collection (see below for details)
  • Page Templates to create a Photo Gallery (see below for details)
  • High quality auto-resizing of images throughout the theme
  • Widget ready
  • Threaded comments support
  • Gravatar support for comments
  • Compatible up to the latest version – WP 2.9
  • Works in all the latest major browsers: Firefox V2.5 and up; IE6, IE7, IE8; Chrome; Safari

Live Demo

Download


The Theme Options Page
General Settings Tab

  • Display Size: Choose to present your site with a width of 960 pixels or by using the full available width of the browser window.
  • Logo: Display your personal logo instead of the standard blog title and tagline.
  • Content: Choose which category you want to feature in the second column on the front page.
  • Comment Rules: Write a sentence or two and display it above the comment form on the posts and pages where comments are enabled. I found it very easy to enhance the quality of the comments by suggesting to my readers to use their real name instead of their company name or keyword spam while commenting on my articles.
  • Footer Text: By default, a copyright sign, the actual year and the blog title are displayed in the footer. This option lets you change this text to your custom needs.
  • Analytics: Lets you easily insert your analytics or statistic tracking code into the footer.php. This will correctly track your visitor statistics by calling this code on every page throughout your site.

Fonts Tab

  • General Font Settings: Change the “main font” and “headline font” and the “font size niveau”. You can choose between the web save font-families. By changing the general “font size niveau”, all font sizes throughout the theme will be changed proportionally. This ensures an optimal readability of all text elements of your site, regardless of what font-family you use.
  • Blog-Title: If you use the blog title and the tagline instead of a logo, you can change the font family and the size for each element in this section.
  • Navigation: This section lets you change the font-family and size of the main navigation bar. You can also choose to use all-caps throughout the whole menu.

Colors Tab
Change all the colors throughout the theme by either using a sophisticated color wheel or by typing the hex-codes for a color into the boxes. You can also use background images for the page body or the content boxes and define their positions and repeating attributes.

The Color tab is divided into the subsections:

  • Background: Main background color and background image settings
  • Navigation: Navigation background and border color settings. Lets you generate a color gradient from a top and bottom color or you can choose to only use one solid color. The live demo of the theme shows a gradient with white as the top color and gray as the bottom color.
  • Boxes: Border and background color of the content boxes. Optional settings for the use of a background image.
  • Font Colors: Change the colors of all text elements from the main font and its link and mouse-over color down to the text elements in the footer.
  • Gallery Colors: Choose a color combination for the text overlays of the gallery album listings, the frame and overlay colors of the lightbox feature.

Navigation Tab
Exclude pages from the main navigation bar and include them in a secondary navigation in the footer. I found this incredibly useful in displaying pages like the Privacy Policy, Terms of Service or the Impressum pages without clogging up the main navigation bar.

In this section of the options page, you also have the choice to link your feedburner URL with the RSS button and add additional icons or chicklets to the navigation bar to link to your favourite social networking sites. To ensure a consistent look, the icons should be 15 x 15 pixels in size.

Advertising Tab
The Advertising options of this theme are cutting edge.

As you know, you can always display advertising within the sidebar, but in general, it is hard to display graphical banners or ads throughout the content sections or the header without touching the source code of your theme and risking having to re-do the work again after an update of the theme is released.

The BigNews Theme gives you the option to add adverting to the following sections of your theme by just pasting the code snippets from your suppliers or your own code into the forms.

The advertising sections are:

  • Header
    • Next to the logo
  • Post
    • Under the post headline
    • In an extra box above the tag box of posts
    • In an extra box above the comment box of posts
  • Pages
    • Under the Page Title in pages
    • In an extra box under the text pox in pages

As you can see, you have full control over almost every aspect of your theme without touching the source code of the theme files.