Flexible web publishing applications like WordPress have truly simplified web design and web development for business users.
This greatly benefits individuals or businesses that want to own a website that is simple, easy and inexpensive to manage.
Prior to blogging and the development of sophisticated CMS software, if you needed to get a professional web site for your business, you normally would have to wait until both the web development and website design processes were completely done. This could mean waiting for weeks, even months!
The introduction of WordPress themes have changed all this. In this post, we look at what themes are, how themes save your business money on web development costs, and how WordPress themes make it easy to customize your WordPress site.
The Evolution Of Website Design
Businesses, especially small businesses, will benefit from a revolution in website design that started a number of years ago. If you are a business owner, you may want to know more about this, because it can save your business thousands of dollars on website development and website design costs.
In a nutshell, this is how things typically worked in “traditional” website design before WordPress were developed:
The first step would be to meet with a website development agency or designer for a brief. Then, the actual “web design” itself had to be discussed and agreed upon. This required spending time and money with someone with web design skills discussing elements of the site like the layout, colors, formats, graphic elements, content, etc.
Every page of your site then had to be individually created with your elements and codes inserted into your content. All the pages were then assembled together into a web site using hyperlinks and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, along with all other files needed to make your website work – script libraries, images, media, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything passed testing and was working how it should (and looking how the client had wanted it to look), was the website deemed as being completed and ready for delivery.
The next phase in the evolution of business website design was the introduction of “web templates”. A web site template allows presentation elements of the web site to be worked on separately from the page content. Having ready-made templates helped speed up the web site creation process and resulted in lowered production costs. This also enabled web site development companies to work with small businesses and clients with smaller marketing budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As more businesses started choosing “template-based” websites, templates started being designed that provided a range of customization settings, such as the option to choose different colours, styles, layouts
As web sites and web editing applications evolved, website templates also began to evolve into web templating “systems” that permit website owners to control the design elements of a web site.
And then, WordPress came along and helped to start a new content management 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 pushes the idea of a website template system further.
The WP theme system controls and unifies all of the design areas of a web site. It allows you to add a “skin” to your entire site much like a template system does but it also also provides users with complete control over the management, presentation and customization of all template features.
As stated in 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 states, a unique and revolutionary feature of WordPress is that how your web site displays to site visitors does not affect your site’s content management aspects.
In plain English terms, what this means is that WordPress themes let you change the appearance of your website as much and as often as you like without modifying your website’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if WP 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 the website. All e-commerce features, site settings and product information will remain unaffected, but the site will look completely different.
Why is this important?
Because when you use WordPress, you no longer need to spend weeks or months waiting for your website to be done. You can get your website built quickly and get started with any WordPress theme you like, and then completely change the look, feel and design of your WordPress site in a few minutes, whenever you choose … and as many times as you like!
Even better, you can easily install a theme on your WP site with no website code editing knowledge required. Just choose any theme you like, install it on your website and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your web design and modify elements like headers, layout, styling options and more with just a few mouse clicks …
Since WordPress is distributed as open source software, web design companies can create themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WP template system.
This means that thousands of high quality WP themes can be downloaded by WordPress users. WP are normally distributed for FREE under the terms of the GNU General Public License Definition, or they can be purchased as Premium (i.e. paid) WordPress themes.
The WordPress team keeps a FREE WordPress Theme Directory which gives WordPress users access thousands of great themes at $0 cost …
(WordPress.org – Themes Directory)
As WordPress becomes more popular, more designers are now starting to develop themes for a wider range of uses.
Themes range from bare-looking, to clever designs that are spectacular and would normally cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to commission. Surprisingly, WP themes are quite inexpensive to buy.
You can see several WP theme galleries that include stunning examples of WP themes in this page:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Themes – Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of choosing WordPress themes over choosing traditional website design:
Installation Is Easy, Fast & Simple
Themes are very easy to install on your site. Simply upload a zip folder that contains the plugin to your Plugin folder via your administrator account and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the themes directory at WordPress.org) directly from your WordPress site’s admin area.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a thriving online community of commercial web designers who, collectively, make thousands of high quality WP Themes available to users. Thousands of these themes are completely free to use!
- Themes give sites a consistent design across all of your blog’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your web site’s content. This allows you replace WordPress themes as often as you want without affecting your website’s information.
- Many themes provide additional built-in functionality and settings that let you easily customize the theme’s style and design properties to create a unique look to suit your business.
- Many themes are built using a framework that lets users update themes to newer versions without losing its unique customizations (e.g. CSS styles)
- WordPress lets you search, upload and install WordPress Themes automatically directly from within your dashboard.
- WP themes helps you save hundreds, even thousands of dollars on website design costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WordPress themes are normally quite inexpensive.
Responsive WordPress Themes
Many WP theme developers are now developing “responsive” themes.
A responsive theme allows a website to automatically readjust the web layout to display smoothly across different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as across different platforms) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for different platforms. Users can scroll, read and display the site on different devices without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring the website owner to install additional browser tools.
Note: When searching for WordPress themes, we recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that the content and layout of your site displays well across your visitors’ devices, it also means that the theme is newer than most non-responsive themes and therefore probably complies with the latest standards and practices of web design and coding.
We hope this article has provided you with a clearer understanding of WP themes, what themes are, how themes can help you save money, and how themes let you easily customize your web site.
In our next article on understanding basic WP features, we show you where to search for the best themes for your website.
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