The introduction of website publishing technologies like the WordPress CMS platform has effectively simplified web design and web development for users.
This greatly benefits individuals or businesses planning to run a website that they can fully manage themselves.
Prior to blogging and the development of powerful CMS software, if you needed to get a site built for your business, you typically had to wait until both the web development and web design processes were fully completed. This could take many weeks, even months!
WordPress themes have changed all this. In this article, you will learn what WordPress themes are, how themes help your business save money, and how WP themes allow you to easily customize your site.
Web Design Revolution
Website owners are benefiting from a tremendous revolution in website design that started several years ago. If you are a business owner, you may want to know about this, because it can save your business a lot of time and money on web development and web design costs.
In a nutshell, this is how things typically worked in “traditional” website design before a CMS tool like WordPress came along:
The first step would be to meet with a website development agency or web designer for a brief. After that, the actual design would be discussed and agreed upon. This meant spending time and money with a professional web designer going over things of the site like the, colours, styles, visual elements, content, etc.
Every page of your site then had to be individually created with the elements and codes written into your content. All pages were then assembled together into a website using hyperlinks and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, along with all other files required to make your site work – script libraries, images, media, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything had been tested and was functioning how it was intended to (and looking how a 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 ”look and feel” of the web site to be worked on separately from content on the page. The introduction of ready-made templates helped speed up the process of developing websites and resulted in reduced production costs. This also enabled web site development agencies to service smaller business clients and clients with smaller budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As more website development firms started adopting “template-based” web design services, templates were developed to offer a range of customizable settings, like the option to choose different colours, styles, layouts
As web sites and web building tools developed, web templates also began to transform into web template “systems” that let users and web designers customize the design components of their website.
Then, WordPress came along and helped to kick off a new business website 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
A WordPress theme takes web template systems one step further.
The WP theme system controls every aspect of your site’s design. It allows you to add a “skin” to your site much like a website template system does but it also also provides users with complete control over the management and customization of the site’s template options.
As WordPress describes in its official 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, a unique and revolutionary feature of a WordPress theme is that the way your website appears to visitors is managed independently of your site’s content management aspects.
In plain English terms, what this means is that WP themes let you modify the design of your site as often as you like without modifying your website’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if WordPress website has been set up for e-commerce, changing the entire look of your site with a different theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the website. All e-commerce features, site settings and product information will remain unaffected, but the site will look completely different.
Why is this such great news for businesses?
Because with WordPress, you no longer have to spend weeks or months waiting for your site to be completed. You can get your business website built simply and get started with any WP theme you like, and then completely modify the look, feel and design of your WordPress site in a few minutes, whenever you decide … and as many times as you like!
Even better, you can easily install a theme on your WordPress site with no web code development knowledge required. Simply choose a WordPress theme you like, install it on your site and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your site’s design and customize elements like headers, page layout, typography and more in less than a few minutes …
Because WordPress is made available as open source software, web design companies can design themes specifically for the WP CMS platform using the WP templating system.
This means that loads of high quality WP themes can be downloaded by WP users. Themes are normally distributed freely under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or they can be purchased as Premium (paid) themes.
The WordPress development team maintains a FREE directory of WP themes which gives WordPress users access thousands of excellent web templates at $0 cost …
(WordPress.org – Free WP Theme Directory)
As more users turn to WordPress for publishing and managing their digital presence, more designers are now starting to develop themes for a wider audience of WordPress users.
WordPress themes vary from functional-looking, to designs that are quite spectacular and could easily cost thousands of dollars to create. Surprisingly, WP themes can be purchased very inexpensively, especially when you compare the price to what it would have cost you if a website designer had to build it from scratch.
You can see a number of WordPress theme galleries containing various examples of great premium WP themes in this article:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
WP Themes – Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of choosing WordPress themes over using web building tools that require traditional website design:
Be Up And Running In No Time
Themes are quite easy to install on your site. Just upload it to your Plugins folder via your admin user area and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the theme directory at WordPress.org) directly from your WP site’s admin area.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a growing online community of commercial theme developers who make thousands of quality WordPress Themes available to WP users. Thousands of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a consistent “look and feel” across all the blog’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your digital content. This means you can change the “look and feel” of your site as often as you like without changing the site’s information.
- Many themes come with built-in functionality and settings that let you easily customize the site’s layout and design elements to create a unique look to suit your preferences.
- Many WP themes are built using a framework that enables you to upgrade the theme to newer theme versions without losing any unique customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress lets you search, upload and install WordPress Themes automatically directly from your dashboard.
- Themes helps you save thousands of dollars on website development costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WordPress themes are normally very affordable.
Responsive Themes
Many WordPress theme developers are now creating “responsive” themes for WordPress.
A responsive theme enables a website to automatically readjust the web layout to display smoothly across different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as across different devices (e.g. computers, tablets, cell phones, etc.) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for each platform. Users can navigate, read and load your site on a range of device browsers without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring website owners to have installed additional browser tools.
Note: When downloading WordPress themes, it’s a good idea to choose a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that the content and layout of your site will work correctly across all of your visitors’ devices, it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore complies with the latest standards of web design and coding.
We hope that this basic overview has helped you gain a better understanding of themes, what WordPress themes are, how themes can help you save money on website design costs, and how WordPress themes make customizing websites easy.
In our next blog post on basic WP features, we show you where to search for great themes for your website or blog.
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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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