Looking for an easily customisable mag theme for web project

Hi,

Along with a few friends I’m in the process of setting up an online magazine of sorts. My own experience – and that of my friends – is in journalism, so while that side of things is no problem, our technical skills are minimal (or non existant really).

The website will be a mix of investigative journalism, culture, humour, art, photography and blogs. In terms of layout, we want something that is more sophisticated than a blog, but obviously not quite as complex as some publications’ websites.

The main reason for posting here is because I’m looking for some suggestions about themes. We want a magazine-style theme that will allow us to have the site divided up into various sections (say Features, Culture, Graphics and Blogs for example), with each of these corresponding to a different section or block on the homepage, and also to page of its own, accesible through the main menu, that will show all that particular latest content in that section.

We’ll also want a main feature block at the top of the page, and to be able to play around with the design as much as possible. At the most basic we’re looking for a black-text-on-white-background theme, but we’d like to be able to play around with the colour scheme and fonts around that.

Here’s the KEY thing: Are there any themes out there that will enable me to do all this without doing any coding? None of us have the skills for that, and we’re on a tight a frame so learning isn’t really an option. A friend of ours has volunteered some – but not much – of his time to do a little coding, so we at least need to find a theme will demand as little coding as possible.

If that’s not possible we’ll need to re-examine our time frame. Does anyone have any suggestions for themes?

We don’t mind paying for a premium theme – my only reservation with that is not being able to experiment with the theme beforehand.

Thanks for reading,

Lenny