Advanced web management systems like the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) have truly simplified web design and web development for anyone wanting to start a website.
This greatly benefits business owners that want a website that they can fully manage.
Before blogging and the development of powerful and simple content management systems, if you wanted a professional business web site, you had to wait until both the website development and website design processes were fully completed. This could mean weeks, sometimes even many months of waiting around!
The development of WordPress themes have changed all this. In this post, we explain what WordPress themes are, how WP themes save you money on website design costs, and how WP themes allow you to easily customize your site.
The Evolution Of Web Design
More website owners today have been benefiting from a great change in web design that started several years ago. If you are a small business owner, you may want to learn more about this, because it can save you thousands of dollars on website development or web design costs.
Let’s briefly take a look at how things used to work in “traditional” web design before WordPress came along:
The first step would be to discuss your requirements with a website development company or designer. Next, the ”look and feel” of your website had to be decided upon. This required time and money being spent with someone with website design skills discussing areas of the site such as the layout, colours, formats, graphic elements, content, etc.
Each page of your web site then had to be hand-coded with all of the design elements and scripts coded around the page content. All the pages were then assembled together into a web site using links and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with all other files needed to make your website work – script libraries, images, media, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything had been tested and performed how it should (and looking the way a client had imagined it to look), was the site deemed as being completed and ready for sign off.
The next phase in the evolution of business website design was the introduction of “website templates”. Web templates allow presentation elements of the web site to be worked on separately from the page content. The introduction of template elements helped make website creation faster and resulted in reduced production costs. This also enabled website designers to expand their services to include businesses and clients with less money to spend …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of small businesses choosing “template-based” web design services increased, web templates were developed that provided different custom settings, like the ability to switch colours, styles, layouts
As websites and website editing tools developed, website templates also began to transform into website template ”systems”, which permitted users to manage the visual aspects of a website.
Then, WordPress was introduced 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:
About WordPress Themes
WordPress themes take the idea of a web template system one step further.
The WP theme system controls and integrates every aspect of your site’s design. It allows you to add a “skin” over your site much like a template system does but it provides you with complete control over the management, appearance and ability to customize template options.
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 features of the WordPress theme is that how your site appears to visitors on the outside is managed independently of the way your website functions in the backend to handle areas like content management and functionality.
Basically, what this means is that themes let you change the design of your site as much and as often as you like without touching your site’s content and all the work you’ve put into it. For example, if you have set up your website for e-commerce, replacing the theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the web site. All e-commerce features, settings and product information will remain unaffected, but your site will look completely different.
This is important. Why?
Because when your site is powered by WordPress, you no longer have to wait until your website’s design is completed. You can get your business website built simply and start with any WordPress theme you want, and completely customize the look, feel and design of your website in mere minutes, whenever you decide … and as many times as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your WordPress site with no website code development knowledge necessary. Simply choose any theme you like, install it on your site and activate it. WordPress lets you change your entire site’s web design and customize elements like header images, layout, typography and more in a few seconds …
Because WordPress is distributed as open source software, web designers can design themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WP templating system.
This means that loads of high quality WP themes can be downloaded by WordPress users. WordPress are normally distributed for Free under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or sold as Premium (i.e. paid) themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE directory of WordPress themes which gives WordPress users access thousands of great WP themes completely free of charge …
(WordPress.org – Theme Directory)
As more users turn to WordPress for publishing and managing their digital presence, more designers are now focusing on developing themes for a wider audience of web users.
WordPress themes vary from corporate-looking, to stylish designs that are impressive and would typically cost thousands of dollars to design. Surprisingly, most themes can be purchased fairly inexpensively, especially when you compare the cost to what it would have cost you if a website designer had to build it from scratch.
You can view several theme galleries that include many examples of great premium WP themes here:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
WordPress Themes – Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of choosing WordPress themes over using tools that require traditional web design:
Quick Installation
Themes are really easy to install on your site. Just upload it to your Plugins folder via your administrator area 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 WordPress admin’s “Theme” section.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a large community of commercial web developers and development companies who, collectively, make thousands of great WP Themes available to WP users. And many of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a consistent look across all the site’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your web site’s content. This makes it possible to change themes as often as you like without disturbing your content.
- Many themes come with built-in features and settings that enable you to easily customize your site’s layout, style and design properties and create a unique look to suit your taste.
- Many themes are built using a framework that enables you to update the theme to newer versions without losing any unique customizations (e.g. CSS styles)
- WordPress allows you to search, upload, install and update WordPress Themes automatically right within the admin panel.
- Themes allow users to save thousands of dollars on web development costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are normally quite affordable.
About Responsive Theme Design
Many theme developers are now creating “responsive” themes.
A responsive theme enables websites to automatically reconfigure the layout to display smoothly over different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as different platforms) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for different types of devices. Users can scroll, read and load a site on all device browsers without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring website owners to install additional display elements.
Note: When downloading WordPress themes, it’s a good idea to choose a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that your website works on all of your visitors’ devices, it also means that the theme is newer than most non-responsive themes and therefore should comply with the latest standards and practices of web design and web coding.
We hope the above article has provided you with a good overview of themes, what WordPress themes are, how they help your business save money on website development costs, and how WordPress themes make it easy to customize a site.
To learn where to search for great themes for your blog, go here:
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