These days, its not uncommon to find free premium quality WordPress themes. A lot of WordPress theme authors, design websites and even Premium theme sellers are now creating and releasing freemium WordPress themes and sharing it with the WordPress community. One good example of such a theme is the Milano theme brought to us by Web2Feel. The Milano theme is an advance magazine style, 2-columned theme that has the qualities of a premium theme and lots of built-in features.

Here’s a short description for the Milano theme.

This is an elegant theme designed with attractive color combination for bloggers who look to make money online via ads. This theme is suitable for any niche. The theme layout is stylish and dynamic contents modules like, image slider, tabbed content area are built into it.

List of Features:

• Premium theme layout
• Multi-level dropdown javascript navigation menu
• Featured sliding posts
• Site wide customizable 125 x 125 custom banner ads
• Adsense enabled
• Tabbed content area * Featured Video * Recent posts * Popular Posts
• Two widgetized sidebars
• Customizable welcome message
• Page navigation enabled
• WP 2.7 ready, threaded comments
• Theme support
• Custom theme option page in the admin panel

Screenshot:

My Take:
Like the Monkeypr theme that I reviewed recently, the Milano is hands down a very pretty and well designed WordPress theme and could easily be marketed as a premium theme. It has a lot of features and built-in functions that most free WordPress themes don’t have and can be found only on premium themes.

The feature that stands out the most from the Milano theme is the featured post slideshow. This feature not only enables the author a cool and attractive way to promote the featured posts but it also provides the user easy access to check out the blog’s featured posts. You can configure the slider, video, Adsense and banner ads from within the WP dashboard via the theme options page. It also has features a javascript-powered multi-level drop down navigation menu that is useful when your blog has a lot of categories and sub-categories.

The Milano theme features page navigation, post excerpts and popular posts and in order for it to work, you’ll have to install 3 plugins – WP Page Navi, Popularity Contest and Limit Post. The theme author has included those 3 plugins into the theme download zip file. This theme also uses the TimThumb script to generate the post thumbnails.

So far, I haven’t found anything negative to say about the Milano theme. Maybe the only things that can be an issue for some users are the color scheme and those required plugins, but those can be easily fixed with a few minor tweaks. Other than that, the Milano theme is an awesome theme. It’s very customizable, easy to install, has lots of features and can be used by any blogger and used for any type of blog niche – personal, technology, entertainment, sports, movie reviews, gadgets, etc.

Great job by the theme designer and hope they’d release more free WordPress themes like these in the near future. Btw, the theme author also provided the PSD file for the header logo, so users can customize it to their own preference.

For more detailed installation instructions, check out the Milano Theme Setup Guide.

Preview or Download the Milano WordPress theme.