Advanced content management technologies like the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) have effectively simplified web design and web development for non-technical business owners.
This greatly benefits entrepreneurial-minded people planning to start or build an online business presence that is relatively simple and easy to manage.
Before “blogging” and the introduction of advanced content management systems, if you wanted a web site, you would have to wait until both the website development and web design processes were completely done. This process could take weeks, even many months!
The introduction of WordPress themes have changed all this. In this post, we explain what WordPress themes are, how they save your business money on website development costs, and how themes make it easy to customize your WordPress site.
Website Design Evolution
Businesses, especially small businesses, will benefit from a revolution in website design that started a number of years ago. If you own a business, you will want to know about this, because it could save your business a lot of time and money on web development or web design costs.
Let’s review what happened before CMS solutions like WordPress were introduced:
First, you would discuss your requirements with a website developer or designer. After that, the “web design” would be discussed and agreed upon. This meant time and money being spent with a professional web site designer discussing elements of the website such as the layout, colours, styles, graphic elements, content, etc.
Each page of your web 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 links and navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with all other files required to make your site work – script libraries, graphic images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only after everything passed testing and functioned how it should (and looking how a client had imagined it to look), was the site considered as being finished and ready to go live.
The next step in the evolution of business website design was the introduction of “website templates”. Web templates allow the design of the web site to be worked on separately from the page content. The introduction of ready-made templates helped speed up the process of developing websites and resulted in lowered production costs. This also allowed website development firms to work with smaller business clients and clients with less money to spend …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of businesses using “template-based” websites increased, web templates were designed that could provide clients with a number of customizable features and options, like the option to choose different colours, styles, layouts
As web sites and web editor tools developed, web templates also began to transform into website template “systems” that let website owners manage their site’s visual elements.
Then, a “blogging” software called WordPress came along and helped to start a new digital 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:
WordPress Themes
A WordPress theme drives the concept of a web templating system much further.
The WP theme system controls and unifies the design elements of your website. It allows you to add a “skin” to your entire site similarly to what a web template system does but it provides you with more control over the management, appearance and customization of the template options.
As WordPress has explained 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 above, a unique and revolutionary feature of WordPress is that how your site appears to site visitors externally is managed separately from how your content is managed.
Basically, what this means is that you can modify the appearance of your site as much and as often as you want without affecting your website’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if you have configured your website for e-commerce, replacing the theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of your website. All e-commerce features, plugin settings and product information will remain intact, but the site will look completely different.
Why is this great for business owners?
Because with WordPress, you no longer have to spend weeks or months waiting for your website design to be done. You can get your website built simply and start with any theme you want, and completely edit the look, feel and design of your WordPress site in a few seconds, whenever you decide … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your WordPress site without needing any website code programming knowledge. Just choose a theme you like, install it on your site and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your entire site’s web design and customize elements like header images, layout, styling options and more in less than a few minutes …
Since WordPress is made available as open source software, web designers from all over the world can design themes specifically for the WordPress CMS platform using the WordPress templating system.
This means that loads of high quality WP themes are made available to WP users. WP are normally distributed for Free under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or they can be purchased as Premium (i.e. paid) WP themes.
The WordPress development team keeps a FREE theme directory which allows WordPress users to download and access, thousands of excellent web templates completely free of charge …
(WordPress.org – WordPress Themes Directory)
As the popularity of WordPress increases, more designers are now focused on creating themes for a wider range of users.
WP themes range from bare-looking, to designs that are beautiful and would normally cost thousands of dollars to develop. Surprisingly, most WordPress themes are very inexpensive to purchase.
You can see several WordPress theme galleries containing various examples of WP themes in this article:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits And Advantages Of Using Themes
Here are just some of the benefits of using WordPress themes over choosing traditional website design:
Ready To Go To Work In Minutes
Themes are quite easy to install on your site. Just upload it to your Plugin folder via your WordPress dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the WordPress theme directory at WordPress.org) directly from within your WordPress dashboard.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a large online community of commercial website designers who, collectively, make thousands of great-looking, high quality WP Themes available to users. And many of these themes are completely free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent “look and feel” across all of your blog’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, menus, layout, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your digital content. This allows you swap WP themes as often as you need without deleting your website’s data.
- Many WordPress themes come with additional features and settings that let you customize the site’s layout and design properties and create a unique look to suit your taste.
- Many themes are built using a framework that enables users to 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 from your site’s administration interface.
- WP themes lets you save thousands of dollars on web development costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WP themes are typically quite affordable.
Responsive WP Theme Design
Many WordPress theme designers are now developing WP themes that incorporate “responsive” web design.
A responsive theme allows a website to automatically reconfigure the layout to display smoothly across different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as across different devices (e.g. computers, iPads, cell phones, etc.) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for different platforms. Users can scroll, read and display the site on most if not all device platforms without having to resize anything, or requiring website owners to have installed additional browser elements.
Note: When selecting, WordPress themes, we strongly recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that the content and layout of your site displays well across all 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.
I hope the above overview has given you a clearer understanding about themes, what themes are, how WP themes help you save money on website design costs, and how themes make customizing sites easy.
In the next article in the article series for non-technical users on helping you understand WP features, we show you where to search for the best themes for your blog.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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