The introduction of flexible content management platforms like the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) has truly simplified web design and web development for website owners.
This is a great thing for individuals or businesses planning to start a website that is simple and easy to manage.
Before “blogging” and the introduction of easy-to-use CMS technologies, if you needed to get a web site built for your business, you typically had to wait until both the website development and website design processes were fully completed. This process could mean waiting around for many weeks, sometimes even many months!
WordPress themes helped change all this. In this post, we explore what themes are, how themes save your business money on web design costs, and how WP themes allow you to easily customize your WordPress site.
The Evolution Of Web Design
More businesses have been benefiting from a tremendous change in web design that began shortly after websites were first introduced. If you are a business owner, you may want to learn more about this, because it could save your business a lot of time and money on web development and web design costs.
In a nutshell, here’s how things worked in “traditional” website development before tools like WordPress came along:
First, you would discuss your requirements with a web development company or web designer. Next, the actual “web design” had to be decided upon. This involved spending time and money with someone with web site design skills going over design elements of your website like the layout, colours, styles, graphic elements, content, etc.
Every page of your site then had to be hand-coded with all the elements and scripts coded around your page content. The pages were then assembled into a web site using hyperlinks and navigation menus and uploaded to your server, along with every other file needed to make your site work – script libraries, graphic images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything had been tested and performed the way it was intended to (and looking the way a client had wanted it to look), was the web site considered to be finished and ready for sign off.
The next step in the evolution of business website design was the introduction of “web templating elements”. Web templates allow the presentation of the website to be worked on separately from content on the page. Having ready-made templates helped to speed up the web site creation process and resulted in lowered costs of production. This also enabled web development companies to expand their services to include businesses with smaller marketing budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of website development firms using “template-based” websites increased, templates started being developed that could offer expanding customization options, such as colour palettes, the ability to specify different content styles, formats, header, footer and navigation elements, layouts, and so on.
As web sites and web editing applications evolved, web templates also began to transform into web template “systems” that let website owners customize the visual components of a web site.
Then, a “blogging” tool called WordPress came along and helped to kick off 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
WordPress themes improve the idea of a website template system further.
A WordPress theme controls all of the design areas of the web site. It allows you to add a “skin” to your entire site much like a template system does but it also also gives you more control over the management, presentation and customization aspects of the site’s template settings.
As per 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 above, one of the unique and revolutionary features of a WordPress theme is that the way your site displays to visitors externally is managed separately from the way your content is managed.
In plain English terms, what this means is that a theme lets you change the design of your website as much and as often as you want without modifying 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 the site with a different theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of your web site. All e-commerce features, site and plugin settings and product information will remain unaffected, but your site will look completely different.
This is important. Why?
Because with WordPress, you no longer need to spend weeks or months waiting for your site to be done. You can get your business website built simply and get started with any theme you like, and then completely customize the look, feel and design of your site in a few minutes, whenever you choose … and as many times as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your WordPress site with no web code development skills necessary. Simply 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 few mouse clicks …
As WordPress is made available as open source software, web designers can create themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WordPress templating system.
This means that loads of high quality WP themes can be downloaded by WordPress users. WordPress are usually distributed freely under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or they can be purchased as Premium (i.e. paid) WP themes.
The WordPress team keeps a FREE theme directory which allows WordPress users to access thousands of great web templates completely free of charge …
(WordPress.org – WP Themes Directory)
As more businesses turn to WordPress for online publishing, more designers are now focused on developing themes for a wider audience of web users.
WordPress themes range from professional-looking, to designs that are beautiful and would typically cost many hundreds of dollars to develop. Surprisingly, WP themes can be purchased very inexpensively, especially when compared to what you would have been charged if a web designer had to develop it from scratch.
You can view a number of WordPress theme galleries containing various examples of great themes in this post:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits & Advantages Of WP Themes
Here are just a few of the benefits of choosing WordPress themes over using traditional website design:
Fast Installation
Themes are very easy to install on your site. Simply upload the plugin file to your Plugin folder via your admin section and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the themes repository at WordPress.org) directly from your WordPress dashboard.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a growing community of professional website developers and development companies who contribute thousands of quality WordPress Themes available to WP users. Thousands of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent look across all of the blog’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, layouts, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your site’s content. This means you can swap the “look and feel” of your web site or blog as often as you want without deleting the blog data.
- Many themes provide built-in functionality and options that allow you to easily customize your site’s layout and design properties to create a unique look to suit your needs.
- Many themes are built using a framework that enables users to upgrade themes to newer versions without losing any unique customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress lets you search, import and install WordPress Themes automatically right inside the site’s administration interface.
- WordPress themes lets you save hundreds, even thousands of dollars on web design costs. Free WP themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WordPress themes are normally quite affordable.
About Responsive WordPress Themes
Many WP theme designers are now creating WordPress themes that incorporate “responsive” design standards.
A responsive theme enables a website to automatically readjust the web layout to display smoothly across different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as across different devices (e.g. PCs, iPads, mobile phones, etc.) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for different platforms. Users can navigate, read and display a site on a range of device browsers without having to resize anything, or requiring website owners to have installed additional themes.
Note: When searching for WordPress themes, it’s a good idea to choose a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that your web site displays well across all devices, it also means that the theme is newer than most non-responsive themes and therefore probably complies with the latest standards of website design and web coding.
We hope that the above article has given you a better understanding of themes, what themes are, how WP themes help your business save money, and how WordPress themes make it easy to customize a web site.
In the next blog post on helping you understand WordPress features, we show you where to find the best themes for your blog.
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