WordPress Themes Explained

This tutorial explains what WordPress themes are, what makes WordPress themes unique, and the benefits of using WordPress themes to improve the design of your website or blog.

WordPress For Newbies - An Overview Of WP ThemesAdvanced website publishing applications like the WordPress CMS platform have truly improved web design and web development for anyone wanting to start a website.

This is terrific news for businesses that want to own a web presence that they can easily manage by themselves.

Before blogging and the development of easy-to-use CMS tools, if you wanted a site, you normally had to wait until both the website development and website design processes were fully completed. This could take weeks, sometimes even months!

The development of WordPress themes have changed all this. In this post, we explore what WP themes are, how they save you money on website development costs, and how themes allow you to easily customize your WordPress site.

A New Development In Website Design

More website owners today have benefited from a tremendous revolution in website design that started many years ago. If you own a business, you may want to know about this, because it could save you a lot of time and money on website development or web design costs.

Very briefly, here’s how things used to work in “traditional” website development before a CMS system like WordPress was developed:

First, you would discuss your requirements with a website development firm or designer. After that, the “web design” itself had to be decided upon. This involved time being spent with someone with website design skills discussing things of your site like the, colors, styles, page elements, content, etc.

Every page of your web site then had to be individually created with all the elements and scripts coded into the page content. All the pages were then assembled into a website using hyperlinks and navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with every other file needed to make your site work – script libraries, images, media elements, etc.

WP Themes - An Introduction

(image source:adobe.com)

Only after everything passed testing and was working the way it was intended to (and looking the way a client had imagined it to look), was the web site deemed as being completed and ready to go live.

Then, web design “templates” came along”. A web template allows ”look and feel” elements of the web site to be created separately from the page content. The development of templates helped to speed up the web development process and resulted in lowered production costs. This also allowed website developers and designers to work with smaller businesses with smaller budgets …

Understanding Themes

(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)

As more businesses started using “template-based” websites, web templates were created to offer various customization settings, such as colour palettes, the ability to pick different formats or header, footer and navigation elements, etc …

As web sites and web editing tools developed, web templates also began transforming into website templating ”systems”, letting users and website developers control the design elements of their web site.

And then, WordPress was introduced and helped to start a new content management revolution …

WordPress Themes - An Overview

(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

A WordPress theme expands the concept of a website template system even further.

A WP theme controls and integrates all of the design elements of your web site. It allows you to add a “skin” over your entire site much like a template system does but also gives you complete control over the management, presentation and customization aspects of the template options.

As explained in 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 stated in the quote above, one of the unique and revolutionary features of WordPress is that the way your site displays to site visitors is an entirely separate system from the management of your content.

Basically, what this means is that you can change the look and feel of your website as much and as often as you want without touching your website’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if you have configured your site for e-commerce, replacing the theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of your website. All e-commerce features, settings and product information will remain intact, but the site will look completely different.

This is important. Why?

Because when your website is powered by WordPress, you no longer have to spend weeks or months waiting for your website to be completed. You can get your business website built quickly and get started with any theme you want, and change the entire look, feel and design of your website in a few minutes, whenever you decide … and as many times as you like!

Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your site without needing website design skills. Simply pick a theme you like, install it on your website and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your website design and customize elements like header images, layout, style settings and more in minutes …

A Newbie's Guide To Understanding Themes

Because WordPress is made available as open source software, website designers can create themes specifically for the WP CMS platform using the WP templating system.

This means that loads of high quality WP themes are made available to WordPress users. WP are usually distributed for FREE under the terms of the GNU General Public License Definition, or they can be purchased as Premium (paid) themes.

The WordPress development team maintains a FREE WordPress Theme Directory which gives WordPress users access thousands of great themes at $0 cost …

Themes - An Introduction

(WordPress.org – Themes Directory)

As WordPress becomes more popular, more designers are now starting to create themes for a wider range of applications.

Themes range from professional-looking, to fancy designs that are simply beautiful and could easily cost many hundreds of dollars to create. Surprisingly, most WordPress themes can be bought fairly inexpensively, especially when you compare the price to what you would have had to pay if a web designer had to code it from scratch.

You can view a number of WP theme galleries containing stunning examples of WordPress themes in this post:

Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!

(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)

Benefits And Advantages Of Using Themes

Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using WordPress themes over using applications that require traditional web design:

Be Up And Running In Minutes

WP themes are very easy to install on your site. Simply upload a zip folder that contains the plugin files to your Plugins 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 your WP dashboard.

WordPress Themes - An Overview

Additionally,

  • WordPress has a large online community of professional web developers and development companies who, collectively, make thousands of fantastic WP Themes available to WordPress users. Thousands of these themes are completely free to use!
  • Themes give sites a consistent look across all the site’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, layout, etc …
  • A “theme” works independently of your site’s content. This allows you change WP themes as often as you want without affecting your underlying content of your website.
  • Many WordPress themes provide additional functionality and settings that allow you to easily customize your theme’s style, layout and design properties and create a unique look to suit your taste.
  • Many themes are built using a framework that lets users upgrade themes to a newer theme version without losing its unique customizations (e.g. styles)
  • WordPress lets you search, import, install and update WordPress Themes automatically within the site’s administration interface.
  • Themes allow users to save hundreds of dollars on website design costs. Free WP themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are normally quite affordable.

About Responsive WP Themes

Many theme designers are now developing WordPress themes that incorporate “responsive” design.

A responsive theme enables a website to automatically readjust screen size to display smoothly over different screen sizes and resolutions, as well as across different devices (e.g. PCs, tablets, mobile phones, etc.) …

A Basic Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes

A responsive theme is also optimized for different types of devices. Users can navigate, read and load your site on various device browsers without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring website owners to install additional display elements.

Note: When downloading WordPress themes, we recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that your web site displays well across your visitors’ devices, 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 web design and coding.

We hope this post has provided you with a good overview of WordPress themes, what themes are, how they can help you save money, and how themes make customizing your web design easy.

In our next blog post on understanding basic features and functionality of WordPress, we show you where to search for the best WordPress themes for your website.

***

"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

***