Flexible web site publishing technologies like WordPress have truly improved web design and web development for business owners.
This greatly benefits businesses thinking of starting a website that is relatively simple and easy to manage.
Prior to “blogging” and the introduction of advanced content management systems, if you needed a professional site, you would have to wait until both the website development and web design processes were fully completed. This could take weeks, even many months!
The development of WordPress themes changed all this. In this post, you will learn what WordPress themes are, how themes can help you save money, and how themes make it easy to customize your site.
Web Site Design Revolution
More businesses today will benefit from a tremendous revolution in website design that has been going for many years now. If you own a small business, you may want to learn more about this, because it can save your business a lot of time and money on website development and website design costs.
Let’s briefly review what used to happen before WordPress was developed:
The first step would be to discuss your requirements with a website development agency or web designer. After that, the actual ”look and feel” of your web site would be discussed and agreed upon. This meant spending time and money with someone with web design skills going over areas of your web site like the, colours, formats, graphic elements, content, etc.
Each page of your website then had to be hand-coded with your design elements and scripts coded into the content. The pages were then assembled together into a web site using hyperlinks and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, along with every other file needed to make your site work – script libraries, images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything had been tested and worked how it should (and looking how a client had wanted it to look), was the site deemed to have been finished and ready for delivery.
The next step in the evolution of business website design was the introduction of “web templates”. Website templates allow the ”look and feel” of the website to be created separately from the page content. Having template elements helped speed up the process of developing websites and resulted in reduced production costs. This also enabled website development agencies to work with smaller business clients with smaller budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of web development firms adopting “template-based” web design services increased, web templates started being created to provide clients with different custom features, such as color palettes, the ability to pick different styles, formats, header, footer and navigation elements, page layouts, etc …
As websites and web building applications evolved, web templates also started to transform into web template ”systems”, letting website owners and website developers customize the visual aspects of a site.
Then, a “blogging” tool called WordPress came along 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:
The WordPress Theme
WordPress themes push the idea of a web template system further.
The WordPress theme system controls and integrates every aspect of your website design. It lets you add a “skin” over your site much like a template system does but it provides users with more control over the management and customization of template options.
As the official WordPress site states …
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 a WordPress theme is that how your site appears to site visitors is kept independent of the management of your content.
In plain English terms, what this means is that you can modify the appearance of your site as often as you like without modifying your site’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if your site has been configured for e-commerce, replacing the theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the site. All e-commerce features, settings and product information will remain unaffected, but your site will look completely different.
This is huge! Why?
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 start with any theme you like, and then completely edit the look, feel and design of your website in mere minutes, whenever you want … and as many times as you like!
Even better, you can easily install a theme on your site without requiring web code programming knowledge. Just pick any theme you want, upload it to your site and activate it. WordPress lets you change your site’s design and customize elements like headers, layout, typography and more in minutes …
Since WordPress is distributed as open source software, web design companies anywhere in the world can design themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WP template system.
This means that thousands of great WP themes can be downloaded by WP users. Themes are generally distributed as Free Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or sold as Premium (i.e. paid) WP themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE directory of WP themes which gives WordPress users access thousands of great themes at $0 cost …
(WordPress.org – Themes Directory)
As more businesses turn to WordPress for publishing and managing their content online, more designers are now starting to create themes for a wider range of applications.
WordPress themes vary from corporate-looking, to designs that are breathtaking and would normally cost hundreds to many thousands of dollars to design. Surprisingly, themes can be bought very inexpensively, especially when you compare the price to what you would have had to pay if a web designer had to code it from scratch.
You can see a number of theme galleries containing many examples of themes here:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits & Advantages Of Themes
Here are just some of the benefits and advantages of using WordPress themes over using traditional web template design:
Really Easy To Install
Themes are quite easy to install on your site. Just upload it to your Plugin folder via your WordPress admin account and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the WordPress themes directory at WordPress.org) directly from within your WordPress dashboard.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a growing community of professional website developers and development companies who make thousands of great-looking, high quality WP Themes available to users. And many of these themes are completely free to use!
- Themes give sites a consistent look across all your blog’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your digital content. This makes it possible to replace themes as often as you need without affecting the content.
- Many themes provide additional built-in features and options that let you easily customize the site’s style, layout and design elements to create a unique look to suit your needs.
- Many themes are built using a framework that allows you to update the theme to a newer theme version without losing its unique customizations (e.g. CSS styles)
- WordPress lets you search, import, install and update WordPress Themes automatically directly from your site’s administration interface.
- Themes lets you save hundreds, even thousands of dollars on web development costs. Free WP themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WordPress themes are typically very inexpensive.
About Responsive WordPress Theme Design
Many WordPress theme developers are now creating WordPress themes that incorporate “responsive” web design.
A responsive theme allows a website to automatically readjust the web layout to display smoothly over different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as different platforms) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for different types of devices. Users can scroll, read and display a site on most if not all devices without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring website owners to have installed additional browser tools.
Note: When purchasing WordPress themes, we strongly recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that the content and layout of your site displays well on your visitors’ devices, it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore probably complies with the latest standards, practices and techniques of web design coding.
Hopefully, the above article has given you a clearer understanding of WordPress themes, what themes are, how themes help you and your business save money on web design costs, and how WordPress themes let you easily customize your site.
In our next blog post on basic features and functionality of WordPress, we show you where to search for the best themes for your website or blog.
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