Flexible content publishing systems like WordPress have effectively improved web design and web development for business owners.
This is great for entrepreneurial-minded people planning to build a website that is relatively easy to manage.
Before “blogging” and the introduction of powerful and effective content management systems, if you needed to build a professional website built for your business, you had to wait until both the web development and web design processes were fully completed. This process could mean waiting around for many weeks, even months!
WordPress themes helped change all this. In this article, you will learn what WordPress themes are, how WordPress themes can help you save money, and how WP themes make it easy to customize your site.
A New Development In Website Design
More businesses have benefited from a great change in website design that has been going for a number of years now. If you own a small business, you may want to know about this, because it can save you a lot of time and money on website development and web design costs.
Let’s go over how things typically worked in “traditional” website development before a CMS software like WordPress was developed:
The first step would be to meet with a website development company or designer for a brief. After that, the “web design” would be discussed and agreed upon. This required spending time and money with someone with website design skills going over elements of your site like the, colors, formats, graphic elements, content, etc.
Each page of your website then had to be hand-coded with all of your elements and scripts coded into your page content. All pages were then assembled into a web site using links and navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with all other files required to make your website work – script libraries, graphic images, media, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything had been tested and performed how it was intended to (and looking how a client had imagined it to look), was the web site deemed to be finished and ready to go live.
Then, web design “templates” came along”. A web site template allows the design of the web site to be created separately from the page content. Having template elements helped to make creating web sites faster and resulted in lowered production costs. This also enabled website development agencies to work with small businesses with smaller marketing budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of businesses adopting “template-based” websites increased, templates were developed to provide expanding custom features, like colour palettes, the ability to specify different formats or page layouts, etc …
As websites and web building applications developed, website templates also began evolving into website templating “systems” that let website owners customize their site’s visual elements.
Then, WordPress came along and helped to kick off a new website 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
WordPress themes drive web templating systems even further.
The WordPress theme system controls every aspect of your website design. It allows you to add a “skin” over your site similarly to what a web template system does but it also also gives you more control over the management and customization aspects of all template settings.
As WordPress explains in its official website …
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 features of a WordPress theme is that the way your website displays to site visitors on the outside is kept independent of your site’s content management aspects.
In simple terms, what this means is that a theme lets you change the design of your site as much and as often as you like without modifying your site’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if WordPress site has been set up for e-commerce, replacing the theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the web site. All e-commerce features, site settings and product information will remain unaffected, but your site will look completely different.
This is huge! Why?
Because when your website is built with WordPress, you no longer have to spend weeks or months waiting for your website to be done. You can get your website built quickly and get started with any theme you like, and then completely edit the look, feel and design of your website in mere seconds, whenever you decide … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your WP site without the need of web code programming skills. Simply choose any WP theme you like, upload it to your site and activate it. WordPress lets you change your site’s design and modify elements like header images, layout, styling options and more with just a few mouse clicks …
As WordPress is distributed as open source software, website design companies can design themes specifically for the WordPress CMS platform using the WP template system.
This means that loads of great WP themes can be downloaded by WordPress users. WordPress are usually distributed for Free under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or sold as Premium (i.e. paid) WP themes.
The WordPress team keeps a FREE directory of WordPress themes which gives WordPress users access thousands of great website templates at no cost …
(WordPress.org – WordPress Themes Directory)
As more businesses turn to WordPress for publishing and managing their digital presence, more designers are now starting to create themes for a wider range of uses.
Themes range from bare-looking, to designs that are simply beautiful and would easily cost thousands of dollars to develop. Surprisingly, most WP themes are very inexpensive.
You can see several theme galleries containing various examples of great premium WP themes in this article:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
WordPress Themes – Benefits And Advantages
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of choosing WordPress themes over choosing web development applications that require traditional website design:
Ready To Use In Minutes
Themes are quite easy to install on your site. Simply upload a zip file containing the plugin files to your Plugins folder via your admin user section and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the free WordPress theme repository at WordPress.org) directly inside your WordPress admin’s “Theme” section.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a large online community of professional theme designers who make thousands of fantastic WordPress Themes available to users. Many of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent design across all of the blog’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your website’s content. This makes it possible to replace themes as often as you want without affecting your blog’s underlying data.
- Many WordPress themes come with additional functionality and options that enable you to easily customize your theme’s layout and design properties to create a unique look to suit your taste.
- Many WP themes are built using a framework that enables users to upgrade the theme to newer theme versions without losing any unique customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress lets you search, upload, install and update WordPress Themes automatically directly from within the admin panel.
- WP themes lets you save hundreds of dollars on website design costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are normally quite affordable.
Responsive WordPress Themes
Many theme developers are now developing “responsive” WordPress themes.
A responsive theme allows a website to automatically readjust screen size to display smoothly over different screen sizes and resolutions, as well as across different platforms) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for different types of devices. Users can scroll, read and load your site on all device platforms without having to resize anything, or requiring the website owner 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 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, practices and techniques of web design coding.
We hope that this article has given you a better understanding of WP themes, what themes are, how they help your business save money on web development costs, and how WP themes let you easily customize your WP site.
To learn where to search for the best WordPress themes for your website or blog, go here:
***
"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
***