Flexible website publishing applications like WordPress have effectively improved web design and web development for anyone wanting to start a website.
This is terrific news for non-technical users that want a web presence that is relatively easy to manage.
Prior to “blogging” and the introduction of easy-to-use content management systems, if you wanted to get a professional site built for your business, you had to wait until both the web development and web design processes were fully completed. This process could mean waiting around for weeks, sometimes even months!
WordPress themes have changed all this. In this post, you will learn what themes are, how they help your business save money on web development costs, and how WordPress themes make it easy to customize your WordPress site.
Web Site Design Evolution
Businesses have been benefiting from a revolutionary change in website design that has been going for many years now. If you own a business, you may want to know about this, because it could save you a lot of time and money on website development and website design costs.
Let’s review how things used to work in “traditional” web development before CMS tools like WordPress were developed:
The first step would be to meet with a web development company or designer for a brief. After that, the actual “web design” itself had to be discussed and agreed upon. This involved time and money being spent with a professional website designer going over areas of the website like the layout, colors, styles, visual elements, content, etc.
Every page of your site then had to be hand-coded with your elements and scripts coded around your content. All the pages were then assembled together into a web site using hyperlinks and navigation menus and uploaded to your server, along with every other file required 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 was supposed to (and looking how a client had wanted it to look), was the site considered to be finished and ready for sign off.
Then, web design “templates” came along”. A website template allows the presentation of the web site to be created separately from content on the page. The introduction of templates helped speed up the website creation process and resulted in lowered costs of production. This also allowed website development firms to service business clients with less money to spend on marketing …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of web site development agencies adopting “template-based” web design services increased, web templates were created that provided various customizable features, like color palettes, the ability to select different menu styles, formats, header, footer and navigation elements, page layouts, etc …
As websites and website editor tools developed, web templates also started transforming into web templating ”systems”, permitting website owners to customize the visual aspects of a website.
Then, WordPress came along and helped to start a new 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:
WordPress Themes
WordPress themes take web templating systems even further.
A WordPress theme controls the design aspects of your website. It lets you add a “skin” over your entire site similarly to what a template system does but it gives you more control over the management, presentation and customization aspects of the site’s template options.
As WordPress states in its 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 states, one of the unique features of WordPress is that how your site displays to site visitors on the outside in no way affects how your content is managed.
In simple terms, what this means is that WordPress themes let you modify the appearance of your site as often as you like without modifying your website’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if your site has been set up for e-commerce, changing the entire look of the site with another theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of your website. All e-commerce features, site and plugin 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 need to spend weeks or months waiting for your site to be completed. You can get your business website built quickly and get started with any WordPress theme you like, and change the entire look, feel and design of your site in seconds, whenever you want … and as many times as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your site without requiring any website design knowledge. Just pick a theme you want, upload it to your site and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your site’s design and modify elements like header images, page layout, style settings and more in a few seconds …
As WordPress is open source software, web design companies can design themes specifically for the WordPress CMS platform using the WordPress 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 General Public License Definition, or they can be purchased as Premium (paid) WP themes.
The WordPress development team maintains a FREE directory of WordPress themes which allows WordPress users to download, access and install thousands of excellent website templates completely free of charge …
(WordPress.org – Themes Directory)
As the popularity of WordPress soars, more designers are now focused on creating themes for a wider audience of web users.
Themes range from professional-looking, to designs that are visually breathtaking and would easily cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to design. Surprisingly, most premium WP themes are fairly inexpensive to purchase.
You can view several theme galleries containing stunning examples of WordPress themes in this page:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
WordPress Themes – Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits of using WordPress themes over using traditional web template design:
Installation Is Easy, Quick And Simple
Themes are quite easy to install on your site. Just upload the plugin file to your Plugin folder via your WP admin account and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the theme repository at WordPress.org) directly from within your WordPress admin’s “Theme” section.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a growing online community of commercial website designers and design companies who, collectively, contribute thousands of great WP Themes available to users. And many of these themes are completely free to use!
- Themes give sites a consistent design across all of your site’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your web site’s content. This means you can change the “look and feel” of your web site as often as you want without deleting your blog settings.
- Many themes provide additional features and settings that enable you to easily customize the theme’s layout, style and design properties to create a unique look to suit your needs.
- Many themes are built using a framework that lets you update themes to newer versions without losing any customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress lets you search, import and install WordPress Themes automatically directly from within your site’s administration interface.
- Themes helps you save hundreds, even thousands of dollars on website development costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are typically very affordable.
About Responsive Themes
Many WP theme developers are now developing themes that incorporate “responsive” design protocols.
A responsive theme enables a website to automatically readjust screen size to display smoothly across 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 display the site on most devices without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring website owners to install additional browser elements.
Note: When searching for WordPress themes, we strongly recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that your web site works across your visitors’ devices, it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore complies with the latest standards of website design and web coding.
I hope that this article has provided you with a good understanding of WordPress themes, what WordPress themes are, how themes help your business save money, and how WP themes allow you to easily customize a website.
To learn where to search for the best WordPress themes for your blog, click here:
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