Powerful web publishing systems like the WordPress CMS have truly simplified web design and web development for website owners.
This greatly benefits entrepreneurial-minded people planning to run a website that is relatively easy to manage.
Before “blogging” and the introduction of user-friendly CMS applications, if you needed a professional business website, you would have to wait until both the web development and website design processes were completely done. This could mean waiting around for many weeks, even months!
WordPress themes changed all this. In this article, you will learn what WordPress themes are, how WordPress themes can help you save money, and how themes help you easily customize your WP site.
The Evolution Of Website Design
More website owners will benefit from a revolutionary change in web design that started a number of years ago. If you own a small business, you will want to know more about this, because it could save your business thousands of dollars on web development and web design costs.
Very briefly, here’s what used to happen before WordPress came along:
The first step would be to meet with a website developer or designer for a brief. After this, the actual design of your web site itself had to be decided upon. This required time and money being spent with someone with website design skills discussing design elements of your web site such as the, colors, formats, graphic elements, content, etc.
Every page of your site then had to be hand-coded with all of your design elements and codes scripted into your content. All of the pages were then assembled together into a website using links and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with every other file needed to make your website work – script libraries, graphic images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only after everything passed testing and performed how it should (and looking how a client had imagined it to look), was the web site considered as being completed and ready to go live.
Then, web design “templates” were introduced”. A web site template allows the design of the web site to be created separately from the page content. The development of templates helped to speed up the process of developing web sites and resulted in lowered costs of production. This also allowed web site development companies to work with businesses with smaller marketing budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of small businesses choosing “template-based” websites increased, templates started being designed to provide expanding customizable features and options, such as the option to choose different colours, styles, layouts
As websites and website editor applications evolved, web templates also started to evolve into website templating “systems” that let users and web designers control the visual elements of a website.
And then, WordPress was developed and helped to start a new website 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 website template systems even further.
The WP theme system controls and unifies the design aspects of your website. It lets you add a “skin” to your entire site similarly to what a template system does but it also also gives you more control over the management, appearance and customization of your template settings.
As WordPress puts 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 features of WordPress is that the way your site appears to site visitors does not affect the way your website functions 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 like without modifying your site’s content and all the work you’ve put into it. For example, if you have configured WP site for e-commerce, replacing the theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the site. All e-commerce features, plugin settings and product information will remain intact, but the site will look completely different.
Why is this important?
Because when you use WordPress, you no longer have to wait until your site’s web design is completed. You can get your business website built simply and get started with any theme you want, and then edit the entire look, feel and design of your site in mere minutes, whenever you want … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily install a theme on your site with no website design knowledge required. Just choose any theme you want, upload it to your website and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your website design and modify elements like headers, layout, typography and more in a few seconds …
As WordPress is made available as open source software, commercial website design companies all around the world can create themes specifically for the WordPress CMS platform using the WordPress template system.
This means that loads of great WP themes can be downloaded by WordPress users. WordPress are usually distributed as Free Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License Definition, or sold as Premium (i.e. paid) WordPress themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE WordPress Theme Directory which gives WordPress users access thousands of excellent themes at $0 cost …
(WordPress.org – Themes Directory)
As more businesses turn to WordPress for publishing and managing their content online, more designers are now starting to create themes for a wider audience of web users.
Themes range from corporate-looking, to designs that are visually impressive and would typically cost many hundreds of dollars to create. Surprisingly, most themes are fairly inexpensive.
You can see several WordPress theme galleries containing stunning examples of WP themes here:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Themes – Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits of using WordPress themes over choosing traditional website design:
Easy, Fast And Simple To Install
Themes are really easy to install on your site. Simply upload it to your Plugins folder via your dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the WP theme directory at WordPress.org) directly from your WP admin’s “Theme” section.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a thriving online community of commercial web developers and development companies who, collectively, make thousands of excellent WP Themes available to users. Thousands of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent design across all of the blog’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your site’s content. This makes it possible to replace WP themes as often as you want without changing your underlying content.
- Many themes come with built-in functionality and options that allow you to easily customize your site’s layout and design elements and create a unique look to suit your needs.
- Many themes are built using a framework that lets you upgrade the theme to newer versions without losing any customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress allows you to search, import and install WordPress Themes automatically directly from within the site’s administration interface.
- Themes allow users to save thousands of dollars on website design costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are typically quite affordable.
About Responsive Themes
Many WordPress theme designers are now creating WP themes that incorporate “responsive” web design.
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 platforms) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for different types of devices. Users can navigate, read and display your site on all devices without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring website owners to have installed additional themes.
Note: When downloading WordPress themes, it’s a good idea to choose a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that your website works 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 and practices of website design and web coding.
I hope the above overview has given you a clearer understanding about WordPress themes, what WP themes are, how WP themes help your business save money, and how themes make customizing your web design easy.
In the next article in the article series on helping you understand features and functionality of WordPress, we show you where to find the best WordPress themes for your website or blog.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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