The development of content management platforms like the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) has truly improved web design and web development for non-technical business owners.
This is great for entrepreneurial-minded people thinking of running a website that they can fully manage themselves.
Prior to “blogging” and the development of easy-to-use content management systems, if you needed a professional business website, you would have to wait until both the web development and web design processes were completely done. This could take many weeks, sometimes even months!
The development of WordPress themes have changed all this. In this article, we will explore what themes are, how themes can help you and your business save money, and how WordPress themes let you easily customize your site.
The Evolution Of Web Site Design
Businesses, especially small businesses, are benefiting from a revolution in web design that has been going for a number of years now. If you own a business, you may want to learn about this, because it can save your business thousands of dollars on website development and website design costs.
Let’s briefly take a look at what typically took place before CMS applications like WordPress were developed:
First, you would meet with a website developer or designer for a brief. Next, the design would be decided upon. This involved time and money being spent with a professional web site designer discussing design elements of your website such as the layout, colors, styles, visual elements, content, etc.
Each page of your website then had to be hand-coded with all of your design elements and scripts coded into your page content. All pages were then assembled together into a web site using hyperlinks and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with all other files required to make your site work – script libraries, images, media, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything had been tested and was performing the way it was intended to (and looking how the client had wanted it to look), was the web site considered as being completed and ready for delivery.
The next phase in the evolution of business website design was the introduction of “website templates”. A website template allows ”look and feel” elements of the web site to be created separately from content on the page. Having template elements helped speed up the process of developing websites and resulted in lowered production costs. This also enabled web developers to work with business clients and clients with smaller budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As more small businesses began adopting “template-based” websites, templates started being designed to offer clients with expanding customization options, like colour palettes, the ability to select different styles, formats, elements, page layouts, and so on.
As websites and website editing software developed, web templates also started to evolve into website template ”systems”, letting website owners and web designers customize the design components of their web site.
Then, WordPress came along and helped to kick off a new online 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:
WordPress Themes
WordPress themes improve web templating systems one step further.
The WP theme system controls every aspect of your web site design. It lets you add a “skin” to your entire site similarly to what a template system does but it provides users with complete control over the management, presentation and customization aspects of template settings.
As WordPress describes in its official website …
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, a unique and revolutionary feature of a WP theme is that how your web site looks to visitors is kept independent of how your website is configured in the backend to handle areas like content management and functionality.
Basically, what this means is that you can modify the design of your website as much and as often as you want without modifying your website’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if you have configured your site for e-commerce, changing the entire look of the site with a different theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the web site. All e-commerce features, settings and product information will remain unaffected, but your site will look completely different.
Why is this important?
Because when your site is built using WordPress, you no longer have to spend weeks or months waiting for your site to be done. You can get your website built simply and get started with any WordPress theme you like, and modify the entire look, feel and design of your website in minutes, whenever you decide … and as many times as you like!
Even better, you can easily install a theme on your WP site without requiring any website code programming skills. Simply pick a WP theme you want, upload it to your site and activate it. WordPress lets you change your site’s design and customize elements like header images, layout, typography and more in minutes …
Since WordPress is open source software, website design companies can create themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WordPress templating system.
This means that loads of great WP themes can be downloaded by WordPress users. WordPress are usually distributed freely under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or they can be purchased as Premium (i.e. paid) themes.
The WordPress team keeps a FREE theme directory which allows WordPress users to download, access and install thousands of great website templates at $0 cost …
(WordPress.org – WP Theme Directory)
As more users turn to WordPress for publishing and managing their content online, more designers are now starting to develop themes for a wider audience of WordPress site owners.
Themes vary from bare-looking, to designs that are stunning and would normally cost many hundreds of dollars to develop. Surprisingly, most themes can be purchased quite cheaply, especially when you compare the cost to what it would have cost you if a website designer had to code it from scratch.
You can see several theme galleries containing many examples of great WP themes here:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits & Advantages Of Using Themes
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using WordPress themes over choosing website building tools that require traditional web template design:
Easy, Quick & Simple To Install
WP themes are very easy to install on your site. Just upload the plugin file to your Plugin folder via your dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the themes directory at WordPress.org) directly from your WordPress dashboard.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a large online community of commercial web developers who, collectively, contribute thousands of quality WordPress Themes available to WP users. And many of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent look across all of the blog’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, layout, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your web site’s content. This makes it possible to replace the “look and feel” of your site as often as you want without changing the site’s information.
- Many themes provide additional features and settings that enable you to easily customize your site’s style, layout and design properties and create a unique look to suit your needs.
- Many WordPress themes are built using a framework that lets you upgrade themes to newer theme versions without losing its unique customizations (e.g. CSS styles)
- WordPress lets you search, import and install WordPress Themes automatically from the site’s administration interface.
- WP themes allow WP users to save hundreds of dollars on website design costs. Free WordPress themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are typically very affordable.
Responsive WordPress Themes
Many theme developers are now developing WP themes that incorporate “responsive” design.
A responsive theme enables a website to automatically resize to display smoothly over different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as different platforms) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for different platforms. Users can navigate, read and display the site on different devices without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring website owners to have installed additional themes.
Note: When selecting, WordPress themes, we strongly recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that the content and layout of your site displays well across your visitors’ devices, but it also means that the theme is newer than most non-responsive themes and therefore probably complies with the latest standards of web design and web coding.
Hopefully, this basic overview has helped you gain a better understanding of WP themes, what WordPress themes are, how themes can help your business save money, and how themes let you easily customize a WP site.
To learn where to find great WP themes for your blog, visit this post: How To Find Great Free And Premium WordPress Web Themes For Your Business Online.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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