Advanced website publishing tools like the WordPress CMS platform have effectively improved web design and web development for website owners.
This is a great thing for business owners that want to own a website that is easy to manage.
Prior to “blogging” and the development of powerful and simple CMS technologies, if you wanted a web site, you would have to wait until both the web development and web design processes were completely done. This could mean waiting around for weeks, sometimes even many months!
WordPress themes helped change all this. In this blog post, we explain what themes are, how they help your business save money on web design costs, and how WP themes allow you to easily customize your site.
Website Design Revolution
More businesses are benefiting from an evolution in website design that started a number of years ago. If you own a small business, you will want to learn about this, because it could save you thousands of dollars on website development or website design costs.
Let’s take a look at how things worked in “traditional” website design before WordPress were introduced:
First, you would meet with a website developer or web site designer for a brief. After this, the actual “web design” would be decided upon. This required spending time and money with a professional website designer going over elements of your site like the, colours, formats, visual elements, content, etc.
Every page of your site then had to be hand-coded with your elements and scripts coded into the page content. All of the pages were then assembled into a web site using links and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, along with every other file needed to make your site work – script libraries, graphic images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything had been tested and functioned the way it was intended to (and looking the way a client had wanted it to look), was the website considered as being completed and ready for delivery.
The next stage in the evolution of business website design was the introduction of “website templates”. Web templates allow presentation elements of the website to be worked on separately from content on the page. The introduction of templates helped make creating web sites faster and resulted in lowered production costs. This also enabled website development agencies to work with smaller businesses with less money to spend …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As more businesses started adopting “template-based” websites, web templates were designed that offered clients with a number of custom settings, such as the option to choose different colours, styles, layouts
As websites and web building software evolved, web templates also started evolving into web template “systems” that let users manage the design components of their website.
Then, WordPress came along and helped to kick off a new content management revolution …
(WordPress – A Content Publishing Revolution)
To learn more about content management systems and the benefits of the WordPress CMS, see the tutorial below:
About WordPress Themes
WordPress themes expand website templating systems much further.
A WP theme controls the design areas of a website. It allows you to add a “skin” to your entire site in a similar way that a web template system does but also provides you with complete control over the management, appearance and customization aspects of your site’s template features.
As per the official WordPress site …
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 the above states, one of the unique and revolutionary features of WordPress is that how your website displays to site visitors is a separate thing from how your site functions in the backend to handle areas like content management and functionality.
In simple terms, what this means is that you can change the design of your website as much and as often as you want 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, replacing the theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the website. All e-commerce features, plugin settings and product information will remain unaffected, but your site will look completely different.
Why is this important?
Because when you use WordPress, you no longer have to wait until your website’s design is completed. You can get your business website built quickly and start with any theme you want, and completely customize the look, feel and design of your website in a few seconds, whenever you want … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily install a theme on your WordPress site with no website code development skills necessary. Just choose any theme you want, upload it to your website and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your web design and customize elements like headers, page layout, styling options and more in a few seconds …
Since WordPress is open source software, web designers all around the world can design themes specifically for the WP CMS platform using the WordPress template system.
This means that thousands of high quality WP themes can be downloaded by WP users. WordPress are usually distributed for FREE under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or they can be purchased as Premium (paid) WP themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE directory of WordPress themes which gives WordPress users access thousands of excellent themes completely free of charge …
(WordPress.org – Free WordPress Theme Directory)
As the popularity of WordPress increases, more designers are now focused on developing themes for a wider range of applications.
Themes range from minimal-looking, to designs that are visually beautiful and could easily cost hundreds to thousands of dollars to design. Surprisingly, WordPress themes are very inexpensive.
You can view a number of theme galleries that include stunning examples of WordPress themes in this article:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits And Advantages Of Using WordPress Themes
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using WordPress themes over using web development applications that require traditional web template design:
Ready To Go To Work In Minutes
Themes are very easy to install on your site. Just upload it to your Plugin folder via your WP administrator account and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the free theme directory at WordPress.org) directly from within your WP admin’s “Theme” section.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a thriving online community of professional web designers who, collectively, make thousands of great WP Themes available to users. Thousands of these themes are completely free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent “look and feel” across all of your blog’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your web site’s content. This makes it possible to swap WP themes as often as you like without deleting the website’s underlying data.
- Many WP themes provide additional features and options that allow you to easily customize your theme’s layout, style and design properties and create a unique look to suit your business.
- Many themes are built using a framework that lets you update themes to newer versions without losing any customizations (e.g. CSS styles)
- WordPress lets you search, upload and install WordPress Themes automatically within the admin panel.
- Themes allow users to save hundreds, even thousands of dollars on website development costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WP themes are typically quite affordable.
Responsive Themes
Many WordPress theme designers are now developing “responsive” themes for the WordPress CMS platform.
A responsive theme enables a website to automatically readjust the web layout to display smoothly over different screen sizes and resolutions, as well as different platforms) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for different types of devices. Users can navigate, read and load the site on various device browsers without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring the website owner to have installed additional display elements.
Note: When downloading WordPress themes, we strongly recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that your web site works 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, practices and techniques of website design and coding.
Hopefully, this post has provided you with a better overview of WP themes, what themes are, how themes can help you and your business save money, and how WP themes make customizing your web design easy.
To learn where to find the best WordPress themes for your website or blog, click here:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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