Flexible website management technologies like the WordPress CMS platform have effectively improved web design and web development for business users.
This is great news for non-technical users planning to start a digital presence that they can fully manage by themselves.
Prior to blogging and the development of sophisticated CMS technologies, if you needed a professional business site, you had to wait until both the website development and web design processes were completely done. This could mean waiting for many weeks, even months!
WordPress themes changed all this. In this blog post, you will learn what themes are, how WP themes save you and your business money on website development costs, and how WordPress themes let you easily customize your WP site.
Web Site Design Revolution
Businesses will benefit from a revolutionary change in website design that has been going for a number of years now. If you own a small business, you may want to learn about this, because it can save you a lot of time and money on web development or web design costs.
Let’s briefly take a look at what used to happen before WordPress was introduced:
First, you would meet with a web development company or designer for a brief. Next, the ”look and feel” of your web site itself would be decided upon. This required spending time and money with a professional web site designer discussing areas of the site like the, colours, styles, graphic elements, content, etc.
Each page of your web site then had to be hand-coded with all of the elements and scripts coded into the page content. All the pages were then assembled together into a web site using links and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with every other file needed to make your site work – script libraries, graphic images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything passed testing and functioned the way it should (and looking how the client had wanted it to look), was the site deemed as being finished and ready for delivery.
Then, web design “templates” were introduced”. A web template allows the ”look and feel” of the web site to be created separately from content on the page. Having template elements helped to speed up the web site creation process and resulted in reduced costs of production. This also allowed web site developers to service smaller businesses with less money to spend on marketing …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As more web site development firms began using “template-based” web design services, templates were created that could provide a number of customization settings, like colour palettes, the ability to select different formats or elements, and so on.
As websites and website editing tools evolved, website templates also started evolving into website templating ”systems”, letting users and website developers customize their website’s design components.
Then, a “blogging” application called 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:
The WordPress Theme
WordPress themes drive the concept of a website templating system one step further.
A WordPress theme controls and unifies all of the design areas of the web site. It lets you add a “skin” over your site similarly to what a web template system does but it provides users with complete control over the management and customization aspects of all template features.
As per the official WordPress 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 a WP theme is that the way your site displays to visitors externally is kept independent of how your content is managed.
In simple terms, what this means is that WP themes let you change the design of your site as much and as often as you want without modifying your site’s content and all the work you’ve put into it. For example, if your website has been set up for e-commerce, changing the entire look of the site with a different theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the web site. All e-commerce features, plugin settings and product information will remain intact, but your site will look completely different.
Why is this important?
Because with WordPress, you no longer need to spend weeks or months waiting for your site to be done. You can get your business website built quickly and start with any WordPress theme you like, and change the entire look, feel and design of your site in mere seconds, whenever you want … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily install a theme on your site with no web code editing skills required. Simply choose a WordPress theme you like, upload it to your site and activate it. WordPress lets you change your site’s design and modify elements like headers, layout, styling options and more in minutes …
As WordPress is distributed as open source software, hundreds of web designers can design themes specifically for the WP CMS platform using the WP templating system.
This means that thousands of great WordPress themes can be downloaded by WP users. WordPress are generally distributed as Free Software under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or sold as Premium (paid) WordPress themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE directory of WordPress themes which gives WordPress users access thousands of excellent WordPress themes at $0 cost …
(WordPress.org – Theme Directory)
As the popularity of WordPress increases, more designers are now starting to develop themes for a wider range of applications.
WP themes vary from professional-looking, to designs that are breathtaking and would typically cost hundreds to many thousands of dollars to design. Surprisingly, themes are fairly inexpensive.
You can see a number of WP theme galleries that include various examples of great WordPress themes in this article:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits Of Themes
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of choosing WordPress themes over choosing traditional web template design:
Installation Is Easy And Quick
WP themes are really easy to install on your site. Just upload a zip file containing the plugin files to your Plugins folder via your WordPress dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the free WordPress theme directory at WordPress.org) directly from your WP admin’s “Theme” section.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a large community of professional website designers who, collectively, make thousands of great-looking, high quality WordPress Themes available to WP users. Thousands of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a consistent design across all your blog’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, menus, layout, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your digital content. This allows you replace WP themes as often as you need without modifying your settings.
- Many WP themes come with built-in functionality and options that allow you to easily customize the theme’s style and design elements to create a unique look to suit your preferences.
- Many WordPress themes are built using a framework that lets you upgrade themes to newer theme versions without losing any unique customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress allows you to search, upload, install and update WordPress Themes automatically right within the admin panel.
- Themes allow users to save hundreds, even thousands of dollars on web design costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are normally quite affordable.
About Responsive Theme Design
Many WordPress theme developers are now creating “responsive” themes.
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. PCs, tablets, smart phones, etc.) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for different platforms. Users can scroll, read and display the site on a range of device platforms without having to resize anything, or requiring website owners to have installed additional browser tools.
Note: When purchasing WordPress themes, we recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that the content and layout of your site will work correctly on 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 and practices of website design.
I hope this article has given you a good overview of WP themes, what themes are, how WordPress themes can help you save money, and how themes make it easy to customize your web site.
In our next blog post in the article series on basic features and functionality of WordPress, we show you where to search for the best themes for your website.
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