If you want to build a news based website using WordPress, then you shoul definitely check out the Smart News wordpress theme. This theme is designed by Dalih and is available for download absolutely free. Unlike many free wordpress themes released on the internet this theme is packed with many awesome features and one can easily mistake it for a premium wordpress theme. Moreover, The homepage of the theme resembles many professional news based websites. It consists of an elegant slider that displays the latest news from your website. Below the slider, you can arrange all your composed articles category-wise, along with their respective thumbnails. The theme also allows you to choose from unlimited background colours and patterns, which results in your website having a unique look. The header of the theme contains a built-in widgets that display all the breaking news and headlines. The header also displays different trending topics from your website. The footer of the homepage can be custoimized to show separate news categories with their thumbnails.

 
Smart News WordPress theme’s theme options page enables you to control and alter your website’s every feature without any hassles. You can easily place banner advertisements on your site through this theme options page. Furthermore, the sidebars of the theme are widget ready and come integrated with a twitter widget, that displays your latest tweets from your twitter account, and a facebook widget. You can place a subscription form for your newsletter in the sidebar and also add a Flickr widget there. A tabbed widget is present in the sidebar that displays the latest posts, the latest comments and the most popular posts of your website. Apart from this, The post page of Smart News has a professional look and below each post, an about the author box is displayed. Moreover, A built-in related posts plugin automatically displays related articles below every article.
 

 
In my opinion this theme is one of the best free WordPress themes available and the coder of this theme has done an outstanding job in building a user friendly and premium quality WordPress theme.

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