Powerful website management tools like the WordPress CMS have effectively improved web design and web development for anyone wanting a website.
This is a great thing for business owners thinking about starting a website that they can fully manage.
Before “blogging” and the introduction of sophisticated content management systems, if you wanted to build a professional web site built for your business, you normally would have to wait until both the web development and web design processes were fully completed. This could mean waiting around for many weeks, even many months!
WordPress themes have changed all this. In this article, we look at what themes are, how themes save your business money on website design costs, and how WP themes make it easy to customize your website.
Website Design Revolution
Businesses will benefit from a tremendous change in website design that has been going for many years now. If you are a business owner, you may want to learn more about this, because it can save you a lot of time and money on web development and web design costs.
Let’s go over how things typically worked in “traditional” web development before WordPress were developed:
The first step would be to meet with a website development agency or web designer for a brief. After that, the design had to be discussed and agreed upon. This involved spending time and money with a professional website designer discussing areas of your site such as the layout, colors, styles, graphic elements, content, etc.
Every page of your site then had to be individually created with all the elements and codes scripted into your content. All pages were then assembled into a website using hyperlinks and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, along with every other file required to make your site work – script libraries, images, media, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything had been tested and was working how it was supposed to (and looking how the client had imagined it to look), was the website considered to be completed and ready for delivery.
Then, web design “templates” came along”. Website templates allow the design of the web site to be created separately from the page content. The introduction of ready-made templates helped to make the process of building websites faster and resulted in lowered production costs. This also enabled web site developers to expand their services to include smaller businesses with smaller budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As more small businesses began choosing “template-based” websites, templates started being introduced that could provide clients with various customization options, like the option to switch colours, styles, layouts
As web sites and web editing applications developed, website templates also started transforming into web template “systems” that enabled website owners to manage the visual components of their website.
Then, WordPress came along 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:
The WordPress Theme
WordPress themes take web templating systems one step further.
A WordPress theme controls every aspect of your website design. It lets you add a “skin” to your site similarly to what a website template system does but also gives you more control over the management, appearance and customization of your template features.
As the official WordPress site states …
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 how your website appears to visitors externally in no way affects how your site works internally to handle areas like content management and functionality.
In plain English terms, what this means is that you can change the design of your site as much and as often as you like 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 your site with another theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the site. All e-commerce features, settings and product information will remain intact, but your site will look completely different.
This is huge! Why?
Because when your site is powered with WordPress, you no longer have to spend weeks or months waiting for your website to be completed. You can get your website built simply and start with any theme you like, and customize the entire look, feel and design of your site in a few minutes, whenever you want … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your WP site without needing website design knowledge. Simply pick a theme you want, install it on your website and activate it. WordPress lets you change your website design and customize elements like headers, page layout, style settings and more with just a couple of mouse clicks …
As WordPress is open source software, web design companies can design themes specifically for the WordPress CMS platform using the WordPress template system.
This means that thousands of great WP themes are made available to WordPress users. Themes are normally distributed for FREE under the terms of the GNU General Public License Definition, or sold as Premium (paid) themes.
The WordPress team keeps a FREE directory of WP themes which gives WordPress users access thousands of excellent themes at $0 cost …
(WordPress.org – WordPress Themes Directory)
As more users turn to WordPress for online publishing, more designers are now focused on creating themes for a wider audience of web users.
Themes vary from functional-looking, to designs that are breathtaking and would easily cost thousands of dollars to design. Surprisingly, most premium WP themes are fairly inexpensive.
You can view several theme galleries that include various examples of great premium WordPress themes here:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
WordPress Themes – Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of choosing WordPress themes over choosing traditional website design:
Ready To Start Using In Minutes
WordPress themes are quite easy to install on your site. Simply upload it to your Plugin folder via your WordPress administrator section and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the WordPress theme repository at WordPress.org) directly from within your WP dashboard.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a growing community of commercial website designers and design companies who make thousands of great WordPress Themes available to WP users. Many of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent look across all of the site’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your digital content. This makes it possible to replace the “look and feel” of your templates as often as you need without modifying the underlying content.
- Many WordPress themes provide additional built-in functionality and options that enable you to customize your site’s layout and design properties and create a unique look to suit your business.
- Many themes are built using a framework that lets users upgrade themes to newer theme versions without losing its unique customizations (e.g. CSS styles)
- WordPress allows you to search, import, install and update WordPress Themes automatically within the dashboard.
- Themes allow users to save hundreds of dollars on website design costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WP themes are normally quite affordable.
Responsive Themes
Many theme designers are now creating themes that incorporate “responsive” design protocols.
A responsive theme allows 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. laptops, iPads, mobile phones, etc.) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for different platforms. Users can scroll, read and display the site on all device platforms without having to resize anything, or requiring website owners to have installed additional browser tools.
Note: When downloading WordPress themes, we strongly recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that your web site works on all of your visitors’ devices, but it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore should comply with the latest standards of web design and web coding.
I hope the above overview has given you a better understanding about themes, what WP themes are, how WordPress themes help you save money, and how WordPress themes make it easy to customize your web site.
To learn where to find great themes for your website, click here:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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