The development of powerful website management applications like the WordPress CMS has truly improved web design and web development for business owners.
This is great for business owners that want a digital presence that is simple, easy and inexpensive to manage.
Prior to “blogging” and the introduction of easy-to-use CMS technologies, if you needed a professional business site, you would have to wait until both the website development and website design processes were completely done. This process could take many weeks, even many months!
The development of WordPress themes have changed all this. In this blog post, we take a look at what themes are, how WordPress themes save you and your business money on web design costs, and how themes allow you to easily customize your site.
A Revolution In Web Site Design
More website owners have benefited from a revolutionary change in website design that began shortly after websites were first introduced. If you are a business owner, you may want to know more about this, because it can save you a lot of time and money on website development and web design costs.
Very briefly, this is what normally took place before tool like WordPress was introduced:
First, you would meet with a website developer or designer for a brief. Next, the actual ”look and feel” of your website would be discussed and agreed upon. This involved time being spent with someone with website design skills going over areas of your website like the, colours, styles, page elements, content, etc.
Each page of your website then had to be individually created with the design elements and codes written into the page 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 functioned how it was supposed to (and looking the way the client had imagined it to look), was the website considered to be finished and ready to go live.
Then, website “templates” were developed”. A web site template allows the design of the website to be created separately from the page content. Having template elements helped to make the process of web site development faster and resulted in reduced production costs. This also enabled website development firms to work with businesses and clients with smaller marketing budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of web development companies choosing “template-based” web design services increased, templates were designed to provide clients with a number of customizable features and options, like the ability to switch colours, styles, layouts
As websites and website building applications evolved, website templates also started to evolve into website templating “systems” that allow users and website developers to customize their web site’s design aspects.
Then, a “blogging” application called WordPress was developed and helped to kick off a new web 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 expand the idea of a website templating system further.
The WordPress theme system controls and unifies every aspect of your web design. It allows you to add a “skin” to your entire site in a similar way that a template system does but also provides you with more control over the management and customization aspects of template settings.
As WordPress explains 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 the above quote states, a unique feature of a WordPress theme is that the way your web site displays to site visitors externally is an entirely different thing from your site’s content management aspects.
In plain English terms, what this means is that a WordPress theme lets you change the look and feel of your website as much and as often as you like without touching your website’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if your website has been set up 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, plugin settings and product information will remain intact, but the site will look completely different.
This is huge! Why?
Because when your site is powered by WordPress, you no longer have to wait until your site’s web design is completed. You can get your website built quickly and start with any WordPress theme you want, and completely modify the look, feel and design of your WordPress site in a few minutes, whenever you want … and as many times as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your WP site without requiring web code programming skills. Just pick any theme you want, install it on your site and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your web design and customize elements like header images, layout, styling options and more in less than a few minutes …
Because WordPress is open source software, website design companies all around the world can create themes specifically for the WP CMS platform using the WP templating system.
This means that thousands of high quality WP themes are made available to WP users. Themes are generally distributed as Free Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or sold as Premium (paid) themes.
The WordPress development team maintains a FREE WordPress Theme Directory which gives WordPress users access thousands of great website templates completely free of charge …
(WordPress.org – Free WP Theme Directory)
As WordPress becomes more popular, more designers are now starting to create themes for a wider range of users.
WP themes vary from functional-looking, to dynamic designs that are quite spectacular and could normally cost many hundreds of dollars to develop. Surprisingly, most themes can be bought very cheaply, especially when you compare the price to what it would have cost you if a website designer had to code it from scratch.
You can view a number of WP theme galleries containing various examples of great premium WordPress themes in this article:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Themes – Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using WordPress themes over choosing website building applications that require traditional web template design:
WordPress Theme Installation Is Easy, Quick And Simple
Themes are very easy to install on your site. Just upload a zip folder that contains the plugin to your Plugins folder via your dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the free WordPress theme repository at WordPress.org) directly from your WP dashboard.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a growing online community of commercial website designers who make thousands of great-looking, high quality WordPress Themes available to WP users. Thousands of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent design across all the blog’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, menus, layout, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your digital content. This means you can swap the “look and feel” of your site as often as you want without changing the underlying content of your blog.
- Many WordPress themes come with additional built-in functionality and options that let you customize the theme’s layout, style and design elements to create a unique look to suit your preferences.
- Many themes are built using a framework that lets users update the theme to newer theme versions without losing any unique customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress lets you search, import, install and update WordPress Themes automatically inside the site’s administration interface.
- WP 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 very inexpensive.
About Responsive Theme Design
Many theme developers are now developing themes that incorporate “responsive” web design.
A responsive theme allows websites to automatically readjust screen size to display smoothly over different screen sizes and resolutions, as well as across different platforms) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for different platforms. Users can scroll, read and load the site on various device browsers without having to resize anything, or requiring the website owner to install additional display elements.
Note: When purchasing WordPress themes, we strongly recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that your web site will work correctly on your visitors’ devices, it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore probably complies with the latest standards and practices of website design and coding.
I hope this article has given you a good overview of WordPress themes, what themes are, how WordPress themes can help your business save money on website development costs, and how themes make customizing sites easy.
To learn where to search for great WordPress themes for your website, see this page: How To Find Great Paid And Free WordPress Templates On The Web.
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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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