The development of web site management tools like the WordPress CMS platform has truly simplified web design and web development for anyone wanting to start a website.
This is great news for businesses planning to build a digital presence that they can easily manage by themselves.
Before blogging and the development of powerful and effective content management systems, if you needed to get a web site for your business, you normally had to wait until both the website development and website design processes were completely done. This process could take weeks, sometimes even months!
The introduction of WordPress themes helped change all this. In this blog post, you will learn what themes are, how themes save your business money on website design costs, and how WordPress themes make it easy to customize your website.
Web Site Design Evolution
More businesses are benefiting from a tremendous revolution in website design that has been going for many years now. If you are a business owner, you will want to learn more about this, because it can save you thousands of dollars on website development or web design costs.
In a nutshell, here’s what typically took place before WordPress were introduced:
The first step would be to discuss your requirements with a website developer or designer. Then, the ”look and feel” of the website would be decided upon. This meant spending time with a professional website designer going over elements of your website such as the, colours, styles, page elements, content, etc.
Each page of your site then had to be individually created with the design 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, along with all other files required to make your website work – script libraries, graphic images, media, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything passed testing and worked the way it should (and looking how the client had wanted it to look), was the site considered as being completed and ready to go live.
The next phase in the evolution of business website design was the introduction of “website templates”. A web site template allows the presentation of the web site to be created separately from the page content. The development of ready-made templates helped make the process of website development faster and resulted in lowered costs of production. This also enabled website developers and designers to expand their services to include small business clients with smaller marketing budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of businesses choosing “template-based” web design services increased, web templates were introduced that could provide various custom features, such as the ability to choose different colours, styles, layouts
As websites and web editor software developed, website templates also began transforming into website template ”systems”, letting users and web designers customize the design components of their website.
And then, a “blogging” tool called WordPress came along 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:
WordPress Themes
WordPress themes push website templating systems much further.
A WordPress theme controls all of the design areas of your website. It lets you add a “skin” over your site in a similar way that a website template system does but it gives you complete control over the management and customization of template options.
As WordPress puts it …
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 how your website displays to visitors on the outside is an entirely separate thing from your site’s functional aspects (e.g. content management and functionality).
In simple terms, what this means is that a theme lets you modify the design of your site as often as you like without touching your site’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if you have set up your website for e-commerce, changing the entire look of the site with another theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of your web site. All e-commerce features, settings and product information will remain unaffected, but your site will look completely different.
This is huge! Why?
Because when your website is powered with WordPress, you no longer have to spend weeks or months waiting for your site to be done. You can get your website built simply and start with any theme you like, and edit the entire look, feel and design of your WordPress site in seconds, whenever you want … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily install a theme on your WordPress site without the need of web code editing knowledge. Just choose a WP theme you like, upload it to your website and activate it. WordPress lets you change your website design and customize elements like headers, page layout, styling options and more in less than a few minutes …
Because WordPress is open source software, thousands of website designers from all over the world can create themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WP template system.
This means that loads of high quality WP themes are made available to WordPress users. Themes are generally distributed freely under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or sold as Premium (paid) themes.
The WordPress development team keeps a FREE theme directory which allows WordPress users to download and access, thousands of excellent WordPress themes at $0 cost …
(WordPress.org – WP Themes Directory)
As WordPress becomes more popular, more designers are now focused on creating themes for a wider audience of web users.
WordPress themes range from functional-looking, to designs that are beautiful and would normally cost hundreds to many thousands of dollars to create. Surprisingly, WordPress themes can be purchased quite cheaply, especially when compared to what it would have cost you if a web designer had to build it from scratch.
You can view a number of theme galleries containing many examples of WP themes here:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
WP Themes – Benefits & Advantages
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using WordPress themes over choosing traditional web template design:
Be Up And Running In Minutes
WP themes are quite easy to install on your site. Simply upload the plugin file to your Plugin folder via your WP dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the theme repository at WordPress.org) directly inside your WP dashboard.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a large online community of commercial theme designers who, collectively, make thousands of fantastic WordPress Themes available to users. And many of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent “look and feel” across all of the blog’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, menus, layout, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your site’s content. This means you can swap WordPress themes as often as you want without disturbing the underlying content of your website.
- Many WordPress themes provide additional built-in functionality and options that enable you to customize your theme’s style, layout and design properties to create a unique look to suit your taste.
- Many WP themes are built using a framework that lets you update the theme to newer theme versions without losing its unique customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress allows you to search, import, install and update WordPress Themes automatically directly from your dashboard.
- WordPress themes lets you save hundreds of dollars on website design costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WordPress themes are typically very inexpensive.
About Responsive Themes
Many WP theme designers are now creating “responsive” WordPress themes.
A responsive theme allows websites to automatically readjust the web layout to display smoothly over different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as across different devices (e.g. PCs, iPads, smart phones, etc.) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for each device type. Users can scroll, read and display a site on various device browsers without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring the website owner to have installed additional browser elements.
Note: When downloading WordPress themes, we recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that the content and layout of your site will display correctly across all devices, but it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore should comply with the latest standards, practices and techniques of website design and coding.
I hope the above overview has given you a better understanding about themes, what themes are, how WP themes help you save money, and how WP themes make customizing web sites easy.
To learn where to find great themes for your website, click here:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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