The introduction of web site management applications like the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) has effectively simplified web design and web development for web users.
This greatly benefits individuals or businesses wanting a digital presence that is easy to manage.
Prior to “blogging” and the introduction of advanced CMS solutions, if you needed a professional website, you typically had to wait until both the website development and web design processes were completely done. This process could take many weeks, even many months!
WordPress themes changed all this. In this article, you will learn what themes are, how themes save you money on web design costs, and how WordPress themes help you easily customize your WordPress site.
The Evolution Of Web Design
More businesses will benefit from a tremendous change in web design that began shortly after websites were first introduced. If you own a small business, you will want to learn more about this, because it could save your business a lot of time and money on web development or website design costs.
Let’s review what used to happen before applications like WordPress were introduced:
The first step would be to discuss your requirements with a website development firm or website designer. Next, the design of your site had to be discussed and agreed upon. This meant time and money being spent with a professional website designer discussing design elements of your site such as the, colours, styles, graphic elements, content, etc.
Each page of your web site then had to be hand-coded with all your design elements and scripts coded into your 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 needed to make your website work – script libraries, images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only after everything had been tested and worked the way it was supposed to (and looking how a client had wanted it to look), was the site considered to have been completed and ready for sign off.
Then, website “templates” were developed”. Web site templates allow presentation elements of the website to be worked on separately from the page content. Having template elements helped make web site development faster and resulted in lowered production costs. This also enabled website development firms to service smaller businesses with less money to spend on marketing …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As more web development firms began using “template-based” web design services, web templates started being developed to provide various custom features and options, such as the option to switch colours, styles, layouts
As web sites and website building tools evolved, web templates also started to transform into web templating ”systems”, enabling users to manage the design elements of a site.
Then, WordPress was developed and helped to start 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:
About WordPress Themes
A WordPress theme expands the idea of a website templating system much further.
A WP theme controls the design aspects of a website. It lets you add a “skin” over your entire site in a similar way that a web template system does but it gives you complete control over the management and customization of template settings.
As WordPress has described in its official 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 and revolutionary feature of WordPress is that the way your website displays to site visitors is kept independent of the management of your content.
Basically, what this means is that themes let you modify the look and feel of your website as often as you like without affecting your website’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if you have configured WP website for e-commerce, changing the entire look of the site with a different theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the site. 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 have to spend weeks or months waiting for your web design to be completed. You can get your business website built quickly and start with any theme you like, and edit the entire look, feel and design of your WordPress site in mere minutes, whenever you decide … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your site with no website code programming knowledge required. Just choose any WP theme you want, upload it to your website and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your entire site’s web design and customize elements like header images, page layout, styling options and more in a few seconds …
Since WordPress is open source software, web design companies can create themes specifically for the WP CMS platform using the WP templating system.
This means that loads of great WP themes are made available to WordPress users. WordPress are generally distributed for FREE under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or they can be purchased as Premium (i.e. paid) WordPress themes.
The WordPress team keeps a FREE WordPress Theme Directory which gives WordPress users access thousands of great themes for free …
(WordPress.org – Themes Directory)
As the popularity of WordPress soars, more designers are now focused on developing themes for a wider audience of web users.
Themes vary from functional-looking, to fancy designs that are visually spectacular and would typically cost hundreds to many thousands of dollars to create. Surprisingly, most premium WP themes can be purchased very cheaply, especially when you compare the price to what it would have cost you if a web designer had to develop it from scratch.
You can see several theme galleries that include stunning examples of great premium WP themes here:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
WP Themes – Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using WordPress themes over choosing web building applications that require traditional web template design:
Be Up And Running In Very Little Time
Themes are quite easy to install on your site. Just upload it to your Plugin folder via your WP dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the theme repository at WordPress.org) directly inside your WordPress site’s admin area.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a growing online community of commercial website developers who, collectively, make thousands of great WP Themes available to users. Thousands of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent design across all of your blog’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, layout, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your digital content. This means you can swap WP themes as often as you like without affecting your site’s settings.
- Many WP themes provide additional functionality and options that enable you to easily customize the site’s style and design elements to create a unique look to suit your business.
- 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 allows you to search, upload and install WordPress Themes automatically from your site’s administration interface.
- Themes helps you save hundreds, even thousands of dollars on website design costs. Free WordPress themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are normally very affordable.
Responsive Themes
Many theme designers are now developing “responsive” themes for WordPress.
A responsive theme enables a website to automatically resize to display smoothly over different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as across different platforms) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for each platform. Users can navigate, read and load your site on most if not all device platforms without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring the website owner to install additional themes.
Note: When purchasing WordPress themes, we recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that your website will work correctly across all of your visitors’ devices, but it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore probably complies with the latest standards, practices and techniques of website design coding.
We hope this post has given you a clearer understanding of WordPress themes, what WP themes are, how they help you save money, and how themes make it easy to customize a website.
To learn where to find the best themes for your blog, go here:
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