The introduction of powerful website publishing systems like the WordPress CMS platform has truly simplified web design and web development for business users.
This is a great thing for business owners thinking of building a website that is easy to manage.
Prior to blogging and the development of user-friendly CMS applications, if you wanted a professional business web site, you had to wait until both the website development and website design processes were completely done. This process could mean weeks, even sometimes months of waiting!
The development of WordPress themes have changed all this. In this blog post, we explore what themes are, how they save you and your business money on website development costs, and how WordPress themes help you easily customize your website.
Website Design Revolution
Website owners will benefit from a change in web design that has been going for a number of years now. If you own a business, you may want to know more about this, because it could save you thousands of dollars on website development or website design costs.
Let’s briefly take a look at how things worked in “traditional” website development before solution like WordPress was developed:
First, you would meet with a web developer or designer for a brief. After this, the actual design would be decided upon. This required time and money being spent with a professional web designer going over design elements of the website such as the, colours, styles, visual elements, content, etc.
Every page of your web site then had to be hand-coded with your elements and codes written into your content. The pages were then assembled into a web site using hyperlinks and navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with all other files needed to make your site work – script libraries, graphic images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only after everything passed testing and functioned how it should (and looking how a client had imagined it to look), was the site considered to have been finished and ready to go live.
Then, website “templates” were introduced”. Web templates allow the ”look and feel” of the website to be worked on separately from content on the page. Having templates helped make web site creation faster and resulted in reduced costs of production. This also allowed website designers to work with smaller businesses and clients with smaller budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of web site development companies choosing “template-based” websites increased, web templates started being designed that could provide various customization settings, such as colour palettes, the ability to specify different styles or content styles, and so on.
As web sites and web building software developed, website templates also began evolving into web templating ”systems”, allowing users to control their site’s visual components.
And then, a “blogging” application called WordPress was developed and helped to start 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
A WordPress theme expands the concept of a website template system much further.
The WP theme system controls every aspect of your web site design. It allows you to add a “skin” to your entire site similarly to what a website template system does but it provides users with more control over the management, presentation and customization aspects of template features.
As WordPress states in its 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 above, a unique and revolutionary feature of a WP theme is that how your web site appears to site visitors in no way affects the way your website works internally to handle areas like content management and functionality.
Basically, what this means is that themes let you change the look and feel of your website as often as you like without affecting your site’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if you have set up your site for e-commerce, changing the entire look of your site with another theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of your web site. All e-commerce features, plugin settings and product information will remain unaffected, but your site will look completely different.
This is huge! Why?
Because with WordPress, you no longer need to spend weeks or months waiting for your site to be completed. You can get your website built quickly and get started with any theme you want, and then customize the entire look, feel and design of your WordPress site in minutes, whenever you want … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your site with no website code programming knowledge necessary. Simply pick any WP theme you like, upload it to your site and activate it. WordPress lets you change your web design and modify elements like header images, layout, style settings and more in a few seconds …
As WordPress is open source software, web designers all around the world can design themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WP templating system.
This means that loads of great WP themes can be downloaded by WP users. Themes are usually distributed for Free under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or they can be purchased as Premium (paid) WordPress themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE WordPress Theme Directory which allows WordPress users to download and access, thousands of great themes completely free of charge …
(WordPress.org – Theme Directory)
As the popularity of WordPress soars, more designers are now focused on developing themes for a wider range of applications.
WordPress themes range from minimal-looking, to designs that are simply impressive and could easily cost many hundreds of dollars to develop. Surprisingly, WordPress themes can be bought very inexpensively, especially when you compare the price to what it would have cost you if a web designer had to build it from scratch.
You can view a number of theme galleries containing stunning examples of themes in this article:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits Of WP Themes
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using WordPress themes over using tools that require traditional web design:
Be Up And Running In No Time
WP themes are very easy to install on your site. Just upload it to your Plugin folder via your administrator login and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the free WordPress theme directory at WordPress.org) directly inside your WP admin’s “Theme” section.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a thriving online community of professional theme developers who, collectively, make thousands of fantastic WP Themes available to users. Thousands of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent “look and feel” across all of the site’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your blog’s content. This makes it possible to change the “look and feel” of your website as often as you like without deleting your site’s settings.
- Many WP themes provide additional built-in functionality and options that let you easily customize the site’s style, layout and design elements to create a unique look to suit your needs.
- Many WP themes are built using a framework that enables you to upgrade themes to newer theme versions without losing its unique customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress lets you search, upload and install WordPress Themes automatically within the admin panel.
- Themes allow WordPress users to save hundreds of dollars on website development costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WordPress themes are normally quite inexpensive.
Responsive WordPress Themes
Many theme designers are now developing WordPress themes that incorporate “responsive” design standards.
A responsive theme enables a website to automatically readjust screen size to display smoothly across different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as across different devices (e.g. PCs, iPads, smart phones, etc.) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for different platforms. Users can navigate, read and display the site on all device platforms without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring the website owner to install additional browser elements.
Note: When purchasing 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 displays well on all of 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 coding.
We hope that this post has given you a better overview of themes, what WP themes are, how they can help you save money, and how WP themes allow you to easily customize a web site.
In our next blog post in the article series for new WP users on basic WP features, we show you where to search for the best themes for your blog.
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