Powerful website management applications like the WordPress CMS platform have effectively improved web design and web development for users.
This is great news for individuals or businesses planning to run an online business presence that they can manage themselves.
Prior to blogging and the development of advanced content management systems, if you wanted a business site, you had to wait until both the web development and website design processes were completely done. This could mean weeks, sometimes even many months of waiting for the work to be done!
WordPress themes have changed all this. In this post, you will learn what WP themes are, how WordPress themes can help you save money, and how themes make it easy to customize your website.
Web Design Revolution
More website owners are benefiting from a great change in web design that has been going for a number of years now. If you are a small business owner, you may want to learn about this, because it could save you a lot of time and money on web development and website design costs.
In a nutshell, here’s how things used to work in “traditional” web design before WordPress was introduced:
The first step would be to meet with a website developer or web designer for a brief. Then, the design of the web site would be discussed and agreed upon. This required spending time and money with a professional web designer going over design elements of the web site like the layout, colours, formats, graphic elements, content, etc.
Each page of your web site then had to be individually created with all of your design elements and codes inserted into your content. All pages were then assembled together into a website using hyperlinks and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with all other files needed to make your site work – script libraries, images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only after everything passed testing and performed how it should (and looking how the client had wanted it to look), was the web site deemed to have been completed and ready to go live.
Then, web design “templates” were introduced”. Website templates allow ”look and feel” elements of the web site to be created separately from content on the page. Having templates helped to speed up the process of developing web sites and resulted in reduced costs of production. This also allowed web developers and designers to work with small business clients with less money to spend on marketing …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As more small businesses started using “template-based” web design services, web templates started being developed that provided a number of customization features and options, like colour palettes, the ability to pick different layouts or elements, and so on.
As websites and website building software evolved, website templates also began to evolve into website templating ”systems”, enabling users and web developers to control the visual components of their web site.
Then, WordPress was developed and helped to start a new business website 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 pushes the idea of a web templating system much further.
A WordPress theme controls the design areas of the website. It lets you add a “skin” over your entire site similarly to what a template system does but also provides you with more control over the management, appearance and customization aspects 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 the above quote states, one of the unique features of WordPress is that how your website looks to site visitors is an entirely separate system from how your website works in the backend to handle areas like content management and functionality.
Basically, what this means is that you can change the look and feel of your website as much and as often as you like without modifying your site’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if WP site 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 site. All e-commerce features, site settings and product information will remain intact, but the site will look completely different.
This is important. Why?
Because when you use WordPress, you no longer have to spend weeks or months waiting for your website to be completed. You can get your business website built quickly and start with any WordPress theme you want, and then completely customize the look, feel and design of your WordPress site in a few minutes, whenever you want … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily install a theme on your site with no website design knowledge required. Simply pick any WP theme you want, upload it to your site and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your site’s design and customize elements like headers, page layout, typography and more with just a few mouse clicks …
As WordPress is made available as open source software, web designers all around the world can create themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WordPress template system.
This means that loads of high quality WP themes can be downloaded by WordPress users. WP are normally distributed for FREE under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or sold as Premium (i.e. paid) themes.
The WordPress team keeps a FREE WordPress Theme Directory which allows WordPress users to download and access, thousands of great themes completely free of charge …
(WordPress.org – Themes Directory)
As more businesses turn to WordPress for online publishing, more designers are now focusing on developing themes for a wider range of users.
WP themes range from corporate-looking, to designs that are beautiful and could easily cost many hundreds of dollars to create. Surprisingly, most premium themes are quite inexpensive.
You can see a number of theme galleries containing many examples of great WordPress themes in this article:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
WP Themes – Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using WordPress themes over choosing web development tools that require traditional web design:
Ready To Use In Minutes
Themes are very easy to install on your site. Simply upload it to your Plugins folder via your WordPress dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the themes directory at WordPress.org) directly from your WP dashboard.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a thriving online community of professional website developers and development companies who contribute thousands of excellent WordPress Themes available to WP users. Thousands of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent design across all of the site’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, menus, layout, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your website’s content. This allows you change themes as often as you need without deleting the blog data.
- Many WP themes provide built-in functionality and settings that allow you to customize the theme’s layout, style and design properties and create a unique look to suit your business.
- Many themes are built using a framework that enables you to update themes to newer versions without losing its unique customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress lets you search, import and install WordPress Themes automatically directly from the site’s administration interface.
- Themes allow users to save hundreds of dollars on website development costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WP themes are typically very inexpensive.
About Responsive WP Theme Design
Many WordPress theme developers are now developing WP themes that incorporate “responsive” design.
A responsive theme enables a website to automatically reconfigure the layout to display smoothly across 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 most if not all devices without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring the website owner to have installed additional browser tools.
Note: When purchasing WordPress themes, it’s a good idea to choose a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that the content and layout of your site will display correctly across your visitors’ devices, but it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore should comply with the latest standards, practices and techniques of web design and coding.
We hope that this basic overview has given you a clearer understanding of WP themes, what WP themes are, how WP themes help your business save money on web design costs, and how themes make customizing web sites easy.
In our next blog post in the article WP newbies on understanding basic WordPress features, we show you where to search for the best WordPress themes for your 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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