I know I talked a lot about the Headway Theme recently, but as an efficient blogger there’s another WordPress theme you may want to try: It is called ShiftNews and it have just been released by WPShift, a company from England dedicated in producing high quality WordPress themes.

In this article, let’s have a look to ShiftNews and let’s see what it have to offer.

If you’d like to buy ShiftNews, don’t forget to visit my other site Coupons for Bloggers to get a 10% discount!

The design

Of course, the first thing you have to consider while purchasing a WordPress theme is indeed the design. Regarding the look of Alex Denning’s (One of WPShift’s founders) personal blog, I was quite afraid that the ShiftNews design could not compete with the market. But the day they launched the theme, I was surprised to see how cool the design is. I still don’t understand why Alex Denning is not using it on WPShout!

Functionnalities

Of course, when you spend money in a so-called “premium” WordPress theme, you want a great design, but you also need your theme to stand out of the crowd by its functionnalities. And ShiftNews have a lot of functionnalities.

Recently WordPress themes have become a lot more advanced and ShiftNews certainly doesn’t disappoint with the features. The homepage is completely widgetised meaning you can take advantage of the built in widgets (which include a choice of featured content sliders, a traditional blog style look and a magazine style column widget!) to create a layout that’s custom for your site. Because the theme uses WordPress’ widgets, you can just drag and drop bits around your homepage which makes using ShiftNews a pleasure.

The documentation included is impressive too – along with a 2000 word long written documentation, there are a whole load of video screencasts embedded in the theme itself so you’re never left wondering what to do next. For example, if you were configuring one of your featured content sliders, you could just watch a screencast right within the widget control panel to see what to do!

Even more features

• Built in contact form
• Ten widget ready areas
• Blog layout page template
• Your own custom homepage layout
• Effortless image resizing
• Multiple post tempaltes
• Multiple jQuery slider widgets
• Awesome dropdown navigation
• Four built in colour schemes with a colour picker to help you make your own
• Social media links
• Threaded comments
• Built in support for popular plugins including PageNavi and YARPP
• Custom search engine options
• Optimised and efficient code

ShiftNews by WPShift. $59.95