The introduction of powerful web site management applications like the WordPress CMS platform has truly simplified web design and web development for business owners.
This is a great thing for business owners thinking of running a website that they can fully manage themselves.
Before blogging and the introduction of powerful content management systems, if you wanted to build a web site for your business, you had to wait until both the web development and website design processes were completely done. This could take many weeks, even many months!
The development of WordPress themes helped change all this. In this post, you will learn what themes are, how they save your business money on website design costs, and how themes allow you to easily customize your WordPress site.
A Revolution In Web Site Design
Website owners have been benefiting from a great change in website design that started many years ago. If you are a business owner, you may want to learn more about this, because it can save your business a lot of time and money on web development or web design costs.
Let’s briefly review what normally took place before tools like WordPress were introduced:
First, you would meet with a web development agency or designer for a brief. Then, the “web design” would be discussed and agreed upon. This involved time and money being spent with someone with web design skills discussing things of the web site such as the layout, colors, formats, page elements, content, etc.
Every page of your site then had to be hand-coded with all of your elements and scripts coded around your content. The pages were then assembled together into a website using links and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, along with every other file needed to make your site work – script libraries, images, media, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only after everything had been tested and worked how it should (and looking the way the client had wanted it to look), was the website considered to have been completed and ready to go live.
Then, web design “templates” were introduced”. A web site template allows design elements of the website to be created separately from the page content. Having template elements helped speed up the web creation process and resulted in reduced costs of production. This also allowed web site designers to expand their services to include business clients with smaller marketing budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of businesses adopting “template-based” websites increased, web templates started being developed that could offer different custom features and options, such as the option to choose different colors, styles, layouts
As web sites and website editing applications developed, web templates also began transforming into website templating ”systems”, allowing users and website developers to manage their web site’s visual components.
Then, WordPress was developed 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 the concept of a web templating system even further.
A WordPress theme controls and integrates all of the design areas of a website. It allows you to add a “skin” over your site in a similar way that a website template system does but also gives you more control over the management and ability to customize the template settings.
As WordPress has described in its web 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 above, a unique feature of WordPress is that how your website appears to site visitors externally is a separate system from how your content is managed.
In simple terms, what this means is that you can change the design of your site as much and as often as you like without touching your website’s content and all the work you’ve put into it. For example, if WP website has been set up for e-commerce, replacing the theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of your website. All e-commerce features, site and plugin settings and product information will remain unaffected, but your site will look completely different.
Why is this great for small business owners?
Because when your site is powered with 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 WordPress theme you want, and then completely modify the look, feel and design of your website in minutes, whenever you want … and as many times as you like!
Even better, you can easily install a theme on your site with no website coding skills necessary. Simply choose any WP theme you like, install it on your website and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your website design and customize elements like headers, layout, styling options and more with just a few mouse clicks …
As WordPress is distributed as open source software, web designers all around the world can create themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WordPress template system.
This means that thousands of high quality WordPress themes are made available to WordPress users. WP are normally distributed for Free under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or sold as Premium (i.e. paid) themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE directory of WordPress themes which gives WordPress users access thousands of great WordPress themes for free …
(WordPress.org – WP Themes Directory)
As the popularity of WordPress increases, more designers are now focused on creating themes for a wider audience of web users.
Themes range from functional-looking, to quirky designs that are beautiful and would easily cost thousands of dollars to develop. Surprisingly, most WordPress themes are very inexpensive.
You can see a number of theme galleries containing many examples of themes in this post:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Themes – Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of choosing WordPress themes over choosing website building applications that require traditional web design:
Fast Installation
WP themes are very easy to install on your site. Just upload a zip folder containing the plugin files to your Plugin folder via your WordPress admin login and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the theme directory at WordPress.org) directly from your WP site’s admin area.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a large online community of professional website developers and development companies who make thousands of great-looking, high quality WP Themes available to WP users. Many of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent look across all the site’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, layout, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your digital content. This allows you replace WordPress themes as often as you need without disturbing your underlying content.
- Many themes come with additional features and options that enable you to easily customize your site’s layout, style and design properties and create a unique look to suit your needs.
- Many WP themes are built using a framework that lets you update the theme to newer theme versions without losing any unique customizations (e.g. CSS styles)
- WordPress lets you search, upload and install WordPress Themes automatically directly from within your site’s administration interface.
- WordPress themes lets you save thousands of dollars on web development costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WP themes are typically quite affordable.
About Responsive WP Theme Design
Many theme developers are now creating “responsive” themes for the WP CMS.
A responsive theme enables websites to automatically readjust the web layout to display smoothly over different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as across different platforms) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for each device type. Users can scroll, read and display the site on different device browsers without having to resize anything, or requiring the website owner to have installed additional browser tools.
Note: When downloading WordPress themes, we recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that your web site will display correctly on your visitors’ devices, but it also means that the theme is newer than most non-responsive themes and therefore should comply with the latest standards of website design and web coding.
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of themes, what WP themes are, how WordPress themes help you and your business save money, and how themes make it easy to customize a WP site.
In the next blog post on basic WordPress features, we show you where to search for great themes for your website.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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