The introduction of advanced content publishing technologies like the WordPress CMS platform has effectively improved web design and web development for website owners.
This is a great thing for entrepreneurial-minded people planning to start or build an online business presence that they can easily manage.
Before blogging and the introduction of sophisticated content management systems, if you needed a professional business site, you normally would have to wait until both the web development and web design processes were completely done. This could mean waiting for many weeks, even many months!
WordPress themes helped change all this. In this article, you will learn what WP themes are, how themes help your business save money on website design costs, and how WordPress themes make it easy to customize your site.
Web Site Design Revolution
More website owners will benefit from a tremendous change in web design that has been going for many years now. If you are a small business owner, you will want to learn about this, because it can save you thousands of dollars on website development or web design costs.
Let’s take a look at how things worked in “traditional” website design before WordPress came along:
First, you would meet with a website development firm or designer for a brief. After this, the actual design of the site had to be decided upon. This involved time being spent with a professional web site designer going over things of the site such as the layout, colors, styles, page elements, content, etc.
Each page of your website then had to be individually created with all your elements and scripts coded into your page content. All of the pages were then assembled together into a web site using links and navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with all other files required to make your site work – script libraries, images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only after everything had been tested and was working how it should (and looking the way the client had imagined it to look), was the web site considered to have been completed and ready for sign off.
Then, website “templates” came along”. Web templates allow the design of the web site to be created separately from the page content. The introduction of template elements helped to speed up the web creation process and resulted in reduced costs of production. This also allowed web development companies to expand their services to include small businesses with less money to spend on marketing …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of small businesses adopting “template-based” websites increased, web templates started being introduced that could provide clients with expanding customization features, like the ability to switch colors, styles, layouts
As web sites and web editing software developed, website templates also started evolving into web template “systems” that let users customize the design elements of a website.
And then, WordPress came along 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:
WordPress Themes
WordPress themes expand website templating systems even further.
A WordPress theme controls and unifies all of the design aspects of your website. It lets you add a “skin” over your site similarly to what a template system does but it gives you more control over the management and ability to customize template settings.
According to 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 the above quote states, one of the unique and revolutionary features of WordPress is that the way your site looks to visitors does not affect the management of your content.
In plain English terms, what this means is that a WordPress theme lets you modify the design of your site as much and as often as you want without affecting your site’s content and all the work you’ve put into it. For example, if you have set up WordPress website 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 and plugin settings and product information will remain intact, but your site will look completely different.
This is important. Why?
Because when your site is powered by WordPress, you no longer need to wait until your website’s design is done. You can get your business website built quickly and start with any WP theme you want, and then change the entire look, feel and design of your website in mere minutes, whenever you decide … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily install a theme on your site without having website code development knowledge. Just pick 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 headers, layout, style settings and more with just a couple of mouse clicks …
Since WordPress is made available as open source software, web designers can design themes specifically for the WordPress CMS platform using the WP template system.
This means that thousands of high quality WP themes can be downloaded by WP users. Themes are generally distributed for FREE under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or sold as Premium (paid) WP themes.
The WordPress development team keeps a FREE WordPress Theme Directory which allows WordPress users to access thousands of great themes for free …
(WordPress.org – Free Theme Directory)
As WordPress becomes more popular, more designers are now starting to create themes for a wider range of users.
WordPress themes range from corporate-looking, to jaw-dropping designs that are quite stunning and would easily cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to design. Surprisingly, most premium WP themes can be bought fairly cheaply, especially when compared to what you would have been charged if a website designer had to code it from scratch.
You can view a number of WP theme galleries containing stunning examples of great themes in this post:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
WP Themes – Benefits And Advantages
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using WordPress themes over choosing applications that require traditional website design:
Be Up And Running In No Time
WP themes are quite easy to install on your site. Simply upload a zip file that contains the plugin files to your Plugin folder via your WordPress admin user area and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the WordPress theme repository at WordPress.org) directly from within your WordPress site’s admin area.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a thriving community of professional web designers and design companies who contribute thousands of excellent WP Themes available to users. And many of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent design across all of the blog’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, layouts, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your blog’s content. This makes it possible to change the “look and feel” of your site as often as you need without affecting the website’s underlying content.
- Many themes come with additional features and options that enable you to customize your theme’s style and design elements to create a unique look to suit your business.
- Many WordPress themes are built using a framework that enables users to upgrade the theme to a newer theme version without losing any unique customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress lets you search, upload, install and update WordPress Themes automatically inside the admin panel.
- Themes allow WP users to save hundreds of dollars on website development costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are normally very inexpensive.
Responsive WordPress Themes
Many theme designers are now creating “responsive” themes for WordPress.
A responsive theme allows a website to automatically resize to display smoothly across different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as different devices (e.g. computers, iPads, smart phones, etc.) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for each device type. Users can navigate, read and display the site on a range of device platforms without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring the website owner to have installed additional display 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 will display correctly across your visitors’ devices, but it also means that the theme is newer than most non-responsive themes and therefore complies with the latest standards and practices of web design and web coding.
We hope the above article has provided you with a clearer overview of themes, what WP themes are, how WordPress themes can help your business save money on website development costs, and how themes make it easy to customize your website.
In our next article on basic WordPress features, we show you where to find the best WordPress themes for your website or blog.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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