Powerful content management systems like the WordPress CMS have truly improved web design and web development for anyone wanting a website.
This is fantastic news for businesses planning to start a website that they can fully manage by themselves.
Before blogging and the development of powerful and effective content management systems, if you needed a business website, you typically had to wait until both the website development and website design processes were fully completed. This could take many weeks, sometimes even months!
The development of WordPress themes changed all this. In this article, we explain what WordPress themes are, how themes can help you save money, and how themes allow you to easily customize your website.
Revolutionary Web Design
More businesses today will benefit from a revolutionary change in web design that began shortly after websites were first introduced. If you own a small business, you will want to know about this, because it could save you thousands of dollars on web development and web design costs.
Let’s briefly go over how things worked in “traditional” website design before tools like WordPress came along:
The first step would be to discuss your project with a web site developer or web designer. After this, the actual design of the site would be discussed and agreed upon. This required time and money being spent with a professional web site designer discussing things of the website such as the layout, colours, styles, visual elements, content, etc.
Each page of your web site then had to be individually created with all of your elements and scripts coded into the content. All the pages were then assembled into a website using links and navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with every other file required to make your website work – script libraries, images, media, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything passed testing and performed how it should (and looking how a client had imagined it to look), was the web site considered to be finished and ready for sign off.
The next step in the evolution of business web design was the introduction of “website templates”. A web site template allows design elements of the website to be created separately from the page content. Having templates helped to make website creation faster and resulted in lowered production costs. This also allowed web development agencies to service businesses with less money to spend on marketing …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As more small businesses started adopting “template-based” web design services, web templates were introduced that offered expanding customizable features and options, like the option to choose different colours, styles, layouts
As web sites and web editing tools evolved, web templates also began evolving into website template ”systems”, which enabled website owners and website developers to control their web site’s visual elements.
And then, a “blogging” application called 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:
The WordPress Theme
WordPress themes take the concept of a website template system further.
The WordPress theme system controls every aspect of your web site design. It allows you to add a “skin” to your entire site in a similar way that a template system does but it also also gives you more control over the management and customization aspects of template features.
As WordPress puts it …
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 feature of WordPress is that the way your website appears to site visitors is a completely separate system from your site’s content management settings.
In simple terms, what this means is that themes let you change the look and feel of your website as much and as often as you like without affecting your site’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if your website has been configured for e-commerce, changing the entire look of your site with another theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of your web site. All e-commerce features, plugin settings and product information will remain intact, but your site will look completely different.
Why is this such a big deal?
Because with WordPress, you no longer have to spend weeks or months waiting for your website design to be completed. You can get your website built simply and start with any theme you want, and completely modify the look, feel and design of your WordPress site in a few seconds, whenever you want … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your site with no website code editing knowledge required. Simply choose a WP theme you like, upload it to 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 in less than a few minutes …
Since WordPress is open source software, commercial web design companies can design themes specifically for the WP CMS platform using the WP templating system.
This means that thousands of high quality WordPress themes can be downloaded by WP users. Themes are usually distributed for FREE under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or they can be purchased as Premium (i.e. paid) themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE directory of WP themes which allows WordPress users to download and access, thousands of great themes at no cost …
(WordPress.org – WP Themes Directory)
As more users turn to WordPress for publishing and managing their digital presence, more designers are now focusing on developing themes for a wider audience of WordPress site owners.
Themes vary from functional-looking, to stylish designs that are visually breathtaking and would easily cost hundreds to thousands of dollars to develop. Surprisingly, themes are quite inexpensive.
You can view several WordPress theme galleries containing stunning examples of great premium WP themes here:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits And Advantages Of Themes
Here are just a few of the benefits of using WordPress themes over choosing applications that require traditional web design:
Quick Installation
WordPress themes are very easy to install on your site. Simply upload it to your Plugins folder via your WordPress admin area and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the themes repository at WordPress.org) directly inside your WP admin’s “Theme” section.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a growing online community of professional theme designers who make thousands of 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 and feel” across all of your blog’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, layouts, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your site’s content. This allows you replace themes as often as you need without deleting the site’s information.
- Many WordPress themes come with built-in features and settings that allow you to easily customize your theme’s layout and design properties to create a unique look to suit your business.
- Many themes are built using a framework that lets you upgrade the theme to newer theme versions without losing any unique customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress allows you to search, import and install WordPress Themes automatically directly from within the admin panel.
- Themes lets you save hundreds of dollars on web development costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WordPress themes are normally very inexpensive.
Responsive Themes
Many theme designers are now developing “responsive” themes.
A responsive theme enables a website to automatically resize to display smoothly over different screen sizes and resolutions, as well as different platforms) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for each platform. Users can navigate, read and load a site on different device platforms without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring website owners to have installed additional browser tools.
Note: When searching for WordPress themes, we recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that your web site works on all of your visitors’ devices, 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 and web coding.
We hope this article has given you a clearer understanding of WP themes, what WordPress themes are, how they can help you and your business save money, and how themes allow you to easily customize your web site.
In the next article in the article series for non-technical users on understanding basic features and functionality of WordPress, we show you where to find the best WP themes for your blog.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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