The development of web management platforms like WordPress has truly improved web design and web development for website owners.
This is terrific news for business owners thinking of building a website that is easy to manage.
Before “blogging” and the development of user-friendly content management systems, if you wanted to get a professional site for your business, you typically would have to wait until both the web development and website design processes were fully completed. This could mean weeks, even sometimes months of waiting!
WordPress themes have changed all this. In this blog post, you will learn what themes are, how WP themes can help you and your business save money, and how themes make it easy to customize your website.
Web Design Revolution
More businesses are benefiting from a great change in web design that began shortly after websites were first introduced. If you own a business, you may want to learn more about this, because it could save you thousands of dollars on website development or website design costs.
In a nutshell, here’s how things used to work in “traditional” website design before WordPress came along:
First, you would meet with a web developer or designer for a brief. Next, the design would be discussed and agreed upon. This involved spending time and money with someone with website design skills discussing design elements of your site such as the layout, colours, formats, graphic elements, content, etc.
Each page of your web site then had to be hand-coded with all your elements and codes inserted into your content. All pages were then assembled into a web site using hyperlinks and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with every other file required to make your website work – script libraries, images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything passed testing and performed the way it was intended to (and looking how the client had imagined it to look), was the site considered to be completed and ready to go live.
The next phase in the evolution of website design was the introduction of “web templates”. Web templates allow ”look and feel” elements of the web site to be worked on separately from the page content. Having ready-made templates helped make the process of building web sites faster and resulted in lowered production costs. This also allowed web site designers to service smaller businesses with smaller marketing budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of businesses using “template-based” websites increased, templates were designed that could provide clients with expanding custom features, like the option to choose different colors, styles, layouts
As web sites and web building software evolved, website templates also began to transform into web template ”systems”, letting users manage their site’s design elements.
Then, a “blogging” application called WordPress came along 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
A WordPress theme pushes web templating systems further.
The WP theme system controls every aspect of your website design. It lets you add a “skin” over your site much like a web template system does but also gives you more control over the management, appearance and customization aspects of template options.
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 stated above, one of the unique features of WordPress is that the way your site looks to visitors is kept independent of the way your website functions internally to handle areas like content management and functionality.
Basically, what this means is that you can modify the look and feel of your website as often as you like without touching your website’s content and all the work you’ve put into it. For example, if your site has been set up for e-commerce, changing the entire look of your site with another theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the web site. All e-commerce features, site and plugin settings and product information will remain unaffected, but the site will look completely different.
Why is this great for business owners?
Because when you use WordPress, you no longer have to wait until your website’s design is completed. You can get your website built quickly and get started with any WordPress theme you want, and then edit the entire look, feel and design of your WordPress site in a few minutes, whenever you decide … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your WP site with no web code development knowledge required. Just pick any theme you like, install it on your website and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your web design and customize elements like headers, layout, typography and more in less than a few minutes …
As WordPress is distributed as open source software, web designers all around the world can create themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WP template system.
This means that loads of great WordPress themes can be downloaded by WP users. WP are generally distributed as Free Software under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or sold as Premium (i.e. paid) themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE directory of WordPress themes which gives WordPress users access thousands of excellent WP themes for free …
(WordPress.org – WP Theme Directory)
As WordPress becomes more popular, more designers are now starting to develop themes for a wider range of applications.
Themes range from bare-looking, to elegant designs that are quite beautiful and could typically cost many hundreds of dollars to design. Surprisingly, WordPress themes can be purchased quite inexpensively, especially when compared to what it would have cost you if a website designer had to code it from scratch.
You can view several WP theme galleries that include many examples of great themes in this page:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
WP Themes – Benefits & Advantages
Here are just a few of the benefits of using WordPress themes over using traditional web template design:
Be Up And Running In Minutes
Themes are very easy to install on your site. Just upload a zip folder that contains the plugin files to your Plugin folder via your admin user account and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the WP themes repository at WordPress.org) directly from within your WP dashboard.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a large community of commercial website designers and design companies who, collectively, contribute thousands of excellent WP Themes available to users. Thousands of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a consistent look across all of your blog’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your website’s content. This allows you swap themes as often as you need without affecting the content.
- Many WP themes provide built-in functionality and options that let you customize your theme’s layout and design elements to create a unique look to suit your preferences.
- Many WordPress themes are built using a framework that allows users to update the theme to newer versions without losing any customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress allows you to search, import and install WordPress Themes automatically inside your dashboard.
- WordPress themes allow WP users to save hundreds, even thousands of dollars on web development costs. Free WP themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are normally very affordable.
Responsive WordPress Themes
Many theme designers are now creating themes that incorporate “responsive” web design.
A responsive theme allows a website to automatically readjust the web layout to display smoothly across different screen sizes and resolutions, as well as across different platforms) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for different platforms. Users can navigate, read and load a site on a range of devices without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring the website owner to have installed additional display elements.
Note: When purchasing WordPress themes, it’s a good idea to choose a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that your website works across your visitors’ devices, but it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore probably complies with the latest standards of web design and coding.
We hope the above article has provided you with a clearer overview of WordPress themes, what WP themes are, how themes help you save money, and how WordPress themes make it easy to customize a website.
In the next blog post on basic features and functionality of WordPress, we show you where to find the best themes for your website.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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