Powerful content publishing technologies like the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) have truly improved web design and web development for non-technical business owners.
This is a great thing for business owners planning to start a digital presence that they can easily manage.
Prior to blogging and the introduction of sophisticated CMS technologies, if you wanted a professional business website, you would have to wait until both the web development and website design processes were completely done. This could take many weeks, even many months!
WordPress themes changed all this. In this blog post, you will learn what WordPress themes are, how WP themes save your business money on website design costs, and how WP themes make it easy to customize your site.
Web Design Revolution
More businesses today are benefiting from a change in website design that started several years ago. If you are a small business owner, you will want to know more about this, because it could save you thousands of dollars on website development or website design costs.
Let’s review what happened before WordPress were introduced:
First, you would meet with a web development agency or web designer for a brief. Then, the actual “web design” had to be decided upon. This meant time being spent with someone with website design skills going over design elements of your web site such as the, colours, formats, graphic elements, content, etc.
Every page of your web site then had to be hand-coded with the elements and codes written into your page content. The pages were then assembled together into a website using links and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together 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 functioned the way it was supposed to (and looking how the client had wanted it to look), was the site deemed as being finished and ready to go live.
The next step in the evolution of business web design was the introduction of “website templating elements”. A website template allows design elements of the website to be worked on separately from content on the page. Having templates helped to make website creation faster and resulted in lowered costs of production. This also enabled website development agencies to service small business clients and clients with less money to spend …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of businesses using “template-based” web design services increased, web templates were developed that could offer various custom features and options, like color palettes, the ability to specify different styles and content styles, and so on.
As web sites and web building applications developed, web templates also started to transform into website templating “systems” that let users and website designers customize their site’s design components.
And then, a “blogging” software 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:
The WordPress Theme
A WordPress theme expands web template systems even further.
A WP theme controls every aspect of your website design. It allows you to add a “skin” to your entire site similarly to what a website template system does but it also also gives you more control over the management, presentation and ability to customize the site’s template settings.
As explained 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 stated in the quote above, a unique feature of the WP theme is that how your web site looks to visitors does not affect how your website is configured internally to handle areas like content management and functionality.
In simple terms, what this means is that themes let you change the design of your website 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 your website has been configured for e-commerce, changing the entire look of the site with another theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of your website. All e-commerce features, plugin settings and product information will remain unaffected, but the site will look completely different.
This is important. Why?
Because when your website is built using WordPress, you no longer need to wait until your website’s design is completed. You can get your website built quickly and start with any WP theme you want, and completely modify the look, feel and design of your website in a few minutes, whenever you decide … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily install a theme on your WP site without requiring any website coding skills. Just choose any theme you want, upload it to your site and activate it. WordPress lets you change your site’s design and customize elements like headers, page layout, typography and more in less than a few minutes …
Since WordPress is open source software, hundreds of web designers can design themes specifically for the WP CMS platform using the WP templating system.
This means that thousands of high quality WordPress themes are made available to WordPress users. WP are generally distributed for FREE under the terms of the GNU General Public License Definition, or sold as Premium (i.e. paid) WordPress themes.
The WordPress development team maintains a FREE WordPress Theme Directory which allows WordPress users to download, access and install thousands of excellent WP themes for free …
(WordPress.org – Free WordPress Theme Directory)
As WordPress becomes more popular, more designers are now focused on developing themes for a wider range of applications.
Themes vary from simple-looking, to designs that are visually breathtaking and could typically cost hundreds to many thousands of dollars to create. Surprisingly, WordPress themes are quite inexpensive to purchase.
You can see several theme galleries that include various examples of WordPress themes in this post:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
WordPress Themes – Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using WordPress themes over choosing tools that require traditional web design:
Ready To Use In Minutes
Themes are quite easy to install on your site. Just upload a zip file that contains the plugin files to your Plugin folder via your dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the free theme repository at WordPress.org) directly inside your WP dashboard.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a growing community of professional web designers and design companies who make thousands of fantastic WordPress Themes available to users. Many of these themes are completely free to use!
- Themes give sites a consistent design across all your site’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your blog’s content. This means you can swap the “look and feel” of your templates as often as you like without changing the underlying content of your website.
- Many WordPress themes provide built-in functionality and options that allow you to customize the site’s layout, style and design properties to create a unique look to suit your preferences.
- Many themes are built using a framework that lets you update themes to a newer theme version without losing its unique customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress lets you search, upload, install and update WordPress Themes automatically from the admin panel.
- WP themes lets you save hundreds, even thousands of dollars on web development costs. Free WP themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are normally very inexpensive.
About Responsive WordPress Themes
Many theme developers are now developing “responsive” WP themes.
A responsive theme allows websites to automatically readjust the web layout to display smoothly across different screen sizes and resolutions, as well as different platforms) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for each device type. Users can navigate, read and display a site on all device platforms without having to resize anything, or requiring website owners to have installed additional display elements.
Note: When searching for 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 will work correctly on all devices, but it also means that the theme is newer than most non-responsive themes and therefore complies with the latest standards of website design coding.
I hope this overview has given you a better understanding of themes, what WP themes are, how themes can help your business save money on web development costs, and how themes make customizing sites easy.
In the next blog post in our article series for new WordPress users on basic features and functionality of WordPress, we show you where to search for the best themes for your website or blog.
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
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