The development of flexible web management platforms like the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) has effectively simplified web design and web development for web users.
This is great news for businesses planning on getting a website that is simple, easy and inexpensive to manage.
Before “blogging” and the development of user-friendly content management systems, if you wanted a professional business site, you had to wait until both the website development and web design processes were fully completed. This could mean waiting for many weeks, sometimes even many months!
WordPress themes changed all this. In this blog post, you will learn what themes are, how themes save you money on web development costs, and how themes help you easily customize your website.
Revolutionary Web Site Design
More businesses have benefited from a tremendous change in web design that started many years ago. If you are a business owner, you will want to learn about this, because it could save your business thousands of dollars on web development or website design costs.
Let’s briefly take a look at what used to happen before CMS solutions like WordPress were introduced:
First, you would discuss your requirements with a web site developer or web designer. After that, the “web design” itself had to be discussed and agreed upon. This involved spending time with a professional web designer discussing things of the site like the layout, colors, styles, page elements, content, etc.
Every page of your site then had to be hand-coded with all of the elements and scripts coded into your content. All pages were then assembled 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, graphic images, media, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only after everything had been tested and worked the way it was intended to (and looking the way the client had wanted it to look), was the web site considered to be finished and ready to go live.
The next stage in the evolution of business web design was the introduction of “website templating elements”. Web site templates allow design elements of the web site to be created separately from content on the page. The development of ready-made templates helped to make developing websites faster and resulted in reduced production costs. This also enabled web site development agencies to expand their services to include businesses and clients with smaller budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of web development companies adopting “template-based” websites increased, templates were designed to offer a number of customization features and options, like colour palettes, the ability to pick different menu styles, formats, header, footer and navigation elements, layouts, and so on.
As web sites and website editing applications developed, web templates also started to transform into web template ”systems”, letting users and web developers control their site’s visual components.
And then, 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
WordPress themes drive the idea of a web templating system even further.
The WordPress theme system controls every aspect of your website design. It allows you to add a “skin” to your site similarly to what a template system does but it provides users with complete control over the management, presentation and customization aspects of all template features.
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 the above quote states, a unique feature of a WP theme is that how your website looks to site visitors externally is a completely separate thing from your site’s content management aspects.
In plain English terms, what this means is that a WordPress theme lets you modify the look and feel of your site as often as you want without modifying your website’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if WordPress website has been set up for e-commerce, changing the entire look of the site with another theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the website. All e-commerce features, 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 website to be done. You can get your business website built quickly and start with any WP theme you want, and then customize the entire look, feel and design of your website in minutes, whenever you want … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your WP site with no website design knowledge required. Just choose any WP 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 header images, page layout, style settings and more in minutes …
Since WordPress is distributed as open source software, thousands of web design companies can design themes specifically for the WP CMS platform using the WP template system.
This means that thousands of great WordPress themes can be downloaded by WordPress users. Themes are generally distributed as Free Software under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or they can be purchased as Premium (paid) WordPress themes.
The WordPress team keeps a FREE WordPress Theme Directory which allows WordPress users to access thousands of great themes completely free of charge …
(WordPress.org – Themes Directory)
As the popularity of WordPress soars, more designers are now focused on creating themes for a wider range of users.
WordPress themes vary from minimal-looking, to designs that are quite stunning and would typically cost hundreds to many thousands of dollars to commission. Surprisingly, most premium themes can be purchased quite cheaply, especially when compared to what you would have had to pay if a website designer had to build it from scratch.
You can view several WP theme galleries containing various examples of themes in this page:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits & Advantages Of Using WP Themes
Here are just a few of the benefits of choosing WordPress themes over using applications that require traditional web design:
Be Up And Running In Very Little Time
WordPress themes are really easy to install on your site. Simply upload the plugin file to your Plugin folder via your dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the themes repository at WordPress.org) directly from within your WP admin’s “Theme” section.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a thriving community of professional website designers and design companies who, collectively, contribute thousands of great-looking, high quality WordPress 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, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your site’s content. This makes it possible to replace themes as often as you need without deleting the settings.
- Many WordPress themes provide additional features and options that let you easily customize your site’s layout, style and design elements to create a unique look to suit your taste.
- Many themes are built using a framework that enables users to update the theme to a newer theme version without losing any unique customizations (e.g. CSS styles)
- WordPress lets you search, import, install and update WordPress Themes automatically directly from the dashboard.
- WP themes allow WP users to save thousands of dollars on website design costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are typically very inexpensive.
Responsive WordPress Theme Design
Many WP theme developers are now creating WordPress themes that incorporate “responsive” web design.
A responsive theme enables websites to automatically readjust screen size to display smoothly across different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as different devices (e.g. laptops, iPads, smart phones, etc.) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for each platform. Users can navigate, read and display your site on all device platforms without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring website owners to have installed additional themes.
Note: When purchasing WordPress themes, we recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that the content and layout of your site displays well 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 of web design.
We hope the above article has given you a good understanding of WordPress themes, what WP themes are, how they help your business save money on website design costs, and how WordPress themes make it easy to customize a site.
In our next blog post in our article WordPress newbies on basic WP features, we show you where to search for the best WordPress themes for your website or blog.
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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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