Powerful web site publishing applications like WordPress have truly improved web design and web development for anyone wanting a website.
This is a great thing for individuals or businesses planning to start a website that they can easily manage themselves.
Before “blogging” and the introduction of powerful and simple CMS solutions, if you needed to build a professional site for your business, you would have to wait until both the website development and web design processes were completely done. This could mean waiting around for many weeks, even many months!
WordPress themes changed all this. In this article, we explore what themes are, how they help you save money on web development costs, and how themes make it easy to customize your WordPress site.
A Revolution In Website Design
Website owners will benefit from a tremendous change in website design that has been going for many years now. If you own a business, you may want to know about this, because it could save your business a lot of time and money on website development or website design costs.
In a nutshell, here’s what happened before WordPress was developed:
The first step would be to discuss your requirements with a website development firm or designer. Next, the “web design” itself had to be decided upon. This involved spending time and money with a professional website designer discussing design elements of your website like the, colors, formats, graphic elements, content, etc.
Every page of your web site then had to be individually created with the elements and scripts coded into your page content. The pages were then assembled together into a web site using links and navigation menus and uploaded to your server, along with every other file required to make your site work – script libraries, graphic images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only after everything passed testing and was functioning the way it should (and looking the way a client had imagined it to look), was the web site considered to be finished and ready to go live.
Then, web design “templates” came along”. Web templates allow the ”look and feel” of the website to be worked on separately from content on the page. The development of template elements helped make the process of creating websites faster and resulted in lowered costs of production. This also allowed website developers and designers to work with small businesses with smaller budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of small businesses using “template-based” web design services increased, templates were designed that provided a number of customizable settings, such as the option to choose different colours, styles, layouts
As websites and website editing software developed, web templates also began to evolve into website templating “systems” that let website owners and web developers control their site’s visual elements.
And then, WordPress was introduced and helped to start a new digital publishing revolution …
(WordPress – A Content Publishing Revolution)
To learn more about content management systems and the benefits of the WordPress CMS, see the tutorial below:
The WordPress Theme
WordPress themes push the concept of a website template system one step further.
A WordPress theme controls the design elements of a web site. It allows you to add a “skin” over your entire site in a similar way that a web template system does but also provides you with complete control over the management, presentation and customization of template settings.
As the official WordPress site explains it …
A WordPress Theme is a collection of files that work together to produce a graphical interface with an underlying unifying design for a weblog. These files are called template files. A Theme modifies the way the site is displayed, without modifying the underlying software. Themes may include customized template files, image files (*.jpg, *.gif), style sheets (*.css), custom Pages, as well as any necessary code files (*.php).
(source: WordPress.org)
As stated in the quote above, one of the unique and revolutionary features of a WP theme is that the way your web site looks to visitors externally does not affect the management of your content.
Basically, what this means is that WordPress themes let you change the design of your website as often as you like without affecting your website’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if you have set up WP website for e-commerce, replacing the theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the web site. All e-commerce features, settings and product information will remain intact, but the site will look completely different.
Why is this great news for small businesses?
Because when you use WordPress, you no longer need to wait until your website’s design is completed. You can get your website built simply and start with any WordPress theme you like, and completely customize the look, feel and design of your WordPress site in a few minutes, whenever you choose … and as many times as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your WP site with no website coding knowledge required. Simply pick any theme you like, install it on your site and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your site’s design and customize elements like headers, page layout, style settings and more in less than a few minutes …
As WordPress is distributed as open source software, website design companies can design themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WP template system.
This means that loads of great WordPress themes can be downloaded by WP users. WordPress are generally distributed for Free under the terms of the GNU General Public License Definition, or sold as Premium (paid) WordPress themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE directory of WP themes which gives WordPress users access thousands of excellent themes for free …
(WordPress.org – WordPress Themes Directory)
As WordPress becomes more popular, more designers are now focused on developing themes for a wider range of uses.
Themes range from corporate-looking, to designs that are simply spectacular and could normally cost hundreds to many thousands of dollars to design. Surprisingly, WordPress themes can be purchased quite inexpensively, especially when compared to what you would have been charged if a website designer had to build it from scratch.
You can view several WordPress theme galleries containing various examples of themes here:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits And Advantages Of Themes
Here are just a few of the benefits of using WordPress themes over using traditional website design:
Easy Installation
WP themes are really easy to install on your site. Just upload the plugin file to your Plugins folder via your WordPress dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the free WordPress theme repository at WordPress.org) directly from within your WP dashboard.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a growing online community of professional theme designers who make thousands of great-looking, high quality WP Themes available to users. And many of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent look across all of your site’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your site’s content. This means you can change WordPress themes as often as you like without deleting the content.
- Many themes come with additional functionality and settings that enable you to easily customize the theme’s layout and design elements and create a unique look to suit your business.
- Many themes are built using a framework that enables you to upgrade themes to newer versions without losing any customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress lets you search, import and install WordPress Themes automatically inside the admin panel.
- WordPress themes helps you save thousands of dollars on web development costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are normally very inexpensive.
About Responsive Theme Design
Many WordPress theme developers are now creating “responsive” themes for WordPress.
A responsive theme allows websites to automatically readjust screen size to display smoothly across different screen sizes and resolutions, as well as different platforms) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for each platform. Users can navigate, read and load a site on most devices without having to resize anything, or requiring website owners to have installed additional browser elements.
Note: When selecting, WordPress themes, it’s a good idea to choose a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that the content and layout of your site works across all devices, but it also means that the theme is newer than most non-responsive themes and therefore should comply with the latest standards and practices of web design.
We hope that the above article has provided you with a good overview of themes, what themes are, how they help your business save money on web development costs, and how themes allow you to easily customize a web site.
In the next blog post in our article series on helping you understand WordPress features, we show you where to find great themes for your blog.
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
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