The development of powerful content publishing platforms like WordPress has effectively improved web design and web development for business owners.
This is a great thing for entrepreneurial-minded people thinking of getting a website that they can manage themselves.
Before blogging and the introduction of sophisticated CMS software, if you wanted 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, sometimes even months!
WordPress themes helped change all this. In this article, we explore what themes are, how WP themes save you money on website design costs, and how themes help you easily customize your website.
Web Design Evolution
More website owners have benefited from a revolutionary change in website design that has been going for several years now. 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 and web design costs.
In a nutshell, this is what happened before WordPress came along:
First, you would discuss your project with a web developer or web designer. After that, the design itself would be decided upon. This meant time being spent with a professional web site designer going over things of your site such as the layout, colours, formats, graphic elements, content, etc.
Each page of your site then had to be individually created with all of your elements and scripts coded around the 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 site work – script libraries, images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything passed testing and functioned the way it should (and looking how the client had imagined it to look), was the web site deemed as being finished and ready for delivery.
The next phase in the evolution of business website design was the introduction of “web templating elements”. Web site templates allow design elements of the website to be worked on separately from the page content. The development of templates helped to make the process of building web sites faster and resulted in reduced costs of production. This also enabled web site development firms to work with businesses and clients with less money to spend on marketing …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As more small businesses started choosing “template-based” web design services, web templates were developed that offered a range of customizable options, like the ability to choose different colors, styles, layouts
As websites and website editing tools evolved, website templates also started to evolve into website templating ”systems”, letting users and web designers control the design elements of their web site.
And then, WordPress was introduced and helped to kick off a new online 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:
The WordPress Theme
WordPress themes expand the concept of a web templating system one step further.
The WP theme system controls every aspect of your website design. It allows you to add a “skin” over your site similarly to what a website template system does but also provides users with complete control over the management, presentation and customization aspects of template options.
As the official WordPress site explains …
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 feature of WordPress is that the way your site displays to visitors on the outside is managed separately from your site’s functionality and content management.
In simple terms, what this means is that WP themes let you modify the look and feel of your site as much and as often as you want without touching your website’s content and all the work you’ve put into it. For example, if WordPress site 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 your website. All e-commerce features, site settings and product information will remain intact, but your site will look completely different.
This is huge! Why?
Because when your website is powered by WordPress, you no longer have to spend weeks or months waiting for your site to be completed. You can get your website built quickly and start with any WordPress theme you like, and then edit the entire look, feel and design of your WordPress site in seconds, whenever you choose … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your site without needing any web code editing knowledge. Just choose a theme you want, upload it to your site and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your web design and customize elements like headers, page layout, styling options and more in a few seconds …
As WordPress is open source software, commercial web designers can create themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WP template system.
This means that thousands of great WordPress themes can be downloaded by WordPress users. Themes are normally distributed for Free under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or they can be purchased as Premium (i.e. paid) WP themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE WordPress Theme Directory which gives WordPress users access thousands of excellent WordPress themes at $0 cost …
(WordPress.org – Free Theme Directory)
As WordPress becomes more popular, more designers are now starting to develop themes for a wider audience of WordPress site owners.
WP themes vary from minimal-looking, to designs that are simply beautiful and would normally cost many hundreds of dollars to develop. Surprisingly, most themes can be purchased quite cheaply, especially when compared to what you would have been charged if a web designer had to build it from scratch.
You can view a number of WordPress theme galleries that include various examples of themes in this page:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Themes – Benefits & Advantages
Here are just a few of the benefits of choosing WordPress themes over choosing traditional web template design:
Be Up And Running In Minutes
Themes are really easy to install on your site. Simply upload it to your Plugin folder via your admin login and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the WP themes repository at WordPress.org) directly from within your WordPress admin’s “Theme” section.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a growing community of commercial web developers who make thousands of quality WP Themes available to WP users. Many of these themes are completely free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent look across all of your site’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, menus, layout, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your digital content. This makes it possible to swap themes as often as you need without affecting your underlying content of your blog.
- Many themes come with additional built-in functionality and settings that allow you to customize your site’s layout, style and design properties and create a unique look to suit your taste.
- Many WP themes are built using a framework that allows you to update the theme to a newer theme version without losing any customizations (e.g. CSS styles)
- WordPress lets you search, upload and install WordPress Themes automatically within your admin panel.
- WP themes helps you save hundreds, even thousands of dollars on website development costs. Free WordPress themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are typically very inexpensive.
About Responsive Themes
Many WP theme developers are now developing WP themes that incorporate “responsive” web design.
A responsive theme enables a website to automatically readjust screen size to display smoothly over different screen sizes and resolutions, as well as different platforms) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for each device type. Users can scroll, read and display a site on various device browsers without having to resize anything, or requiring website owners to install additional browser tools.
Note: When selecting, WordPress themes, it’s a good idea to choose a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that the content and layout of your site works on your visitors’ devices, it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore complies with the latest standards and practices of web design and coding.
Hopefully, the above article has given you a clearer understanding of themes, what themes are, how WordPress themes can help your business save money on website design costs, and how themes make customizing websites easy.
In our next article in the article series on helping you understand WordPress features, we show you where to search for great themes for your website.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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