WordPress Themes Explained

This tutorial explains what WordPress themes are, what makes WordPress themes unique, and the benefits of using WordPress themes to improve the design of your website or blog.

WP For Business - An Overview Of ThemesPowerful content management applications like WordPress have effectively simplified web design and web development for anyone wanting to start a website.

This is a great thing for business owners planning to build a digital presence that is simple and easy to manage.

Before blogging and the introduction of user-friendly CMS software, if you needed a professional business site, you normally had to wait until both the web development and website design processes were completely done. This process could mean waiting around for many weeks, even months!

WordPress themes have changed all this. In this article, we take a look at what WP themes are, how they help your business save money on web design costs, and how themes help you easily customize your WordPress site.

Web Site Design Evolution

More businesses today will benefit from a tremendous change in website design that has been going for many years now. If you are a small business owner, you will want to learn about this, because it could save your business thousands of dollars on website development and web design costs.

Let’s take a look at how things typically worked in “traditional” web design before a CMS application like WordPress was introduced:

The first step would be to meet with a web development agency or web site designer for a brief. Next, the actual “web design” would be decided upon. This involved spending time and money with someone with web site design skills going over elements of the web site like the, colours, formats, page elements, content, etc.

Each page of your website then had to be individually created with all the design elements and codes scripted into the content. All pages were then assembled into a web site using links and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with all other files needed to make your site work – script libraries, graphic images, media, etc.

A Newbie's Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes

(image source:adobe.com)

Only after everything passed testing and performed the way it should (and looking the way a client had wanted it to look), was the website deemed to have been completed and ready to go live.

The next stage in the evolution of business web design was the introduction of “website templating elements”. A web template allows design elements of the website to be created separately from the page content. The introduction of template elements helped speed up the web site creation process and resulted in lowered costs of production. This also allowed web site development companies to service smaller business clients and clients with smaller marketing budgets …

Understanding WordPress Themes

(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)

As more web site development companies began choosing “template-based” web design services, web templates started being developed to offer a number of customization features, such as the ability to choose different colors, styles, layouts

As websites and web editing software evolved, website templates also began evolving into web templating ”systems”, which permitted website owners to customize the visual components of a website.

And then, WordPress was developed and helped to kick off a new business website revolution …

WordPress Themes - An Introduction

(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

WordPress themes take the idea of a website templating system one step further.

The WP theme system controls and integrates every aspect of your site’s design. It allows you to add a “skin” to your site similarly to what a template system does but it also also provides users with more control over the management and ability to customize all template features.

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 stated above, one of the unique features of a WP theme is that how your website displays to visitors in no way affects your site’s functional aspects (e.g. content management and functionality).

In simple terms, what this means is that a WP theme lets you change the design of your site as often as you want without affecting your site’s content and all the work you’ve put 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 your website. All e-commerce features, site settings and product information will remain intact, but the site will look completely different.

Why is this such great news for business owners?

Because when you use WordPress, you no longer have to spend weeks or months waiting for your website to be done. You can get your website built simply and start with any theme you want, and then completely modify the look, feel and design of your WordPress site in seconds, whenever you want … and as many times as you like!

Even better, you can easily install a theme on your site with no web code development skills required. Just choose any WP theme you like, install it on your site and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your site’s design and customize elements like header images, layout, style settings and more in less than a few minutes …

WordPress Themes - An Introduction

Since WordPress is open source software, professional website designers all around the world can create themes specifically for the WordPress CMS platform using the WP templating system.

This means that thousands of great WordPress themes are made available to WordPress users. WordPress are usually distributed for FREE under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or sold as Premium (paid) themes.

The WordPress development team keeps a FREE WordPress Theme Directory which allows WordPress users to download, access and install thousands of great website templates at no cost …

Understanding WP Themes

(WordPress.org – Free WP Theme Directory)

As the popularity of WordPress soars, more designers are now focusing on creating themes for a wider audience of web users.

Themes range from simple-looking, to dynamic designs that are visually impressive and would normally cost hundreds to many thousands of dollars to design. Surprisingly, themes can be bought quite cheaply, especially when compared to what it would have cost you if a website designer had to code it from scratch.

You can view a number of theme galleries containing various examples of great premium themes here:

Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!

(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)

Benefits Of Using Themes

Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of choosing WordPress themes over using traditional web design:

WordPress Theme Installation Is Easy

WordPress themes are very easy to install on your site. Just upload it to your Plugin folder via your dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the WordPress themes directory at WordPress.org) directly from your WP site’s admin area.

A Basic Guide To Themes

Additionally,

  • WordPress has a thriving community of professional website designers and design companies who, collectively, make thousands of professional WordPress Themes available to users. Thousands of these themes are completely free to use!
  • Themes give sites a unified and consistent “look and feel” across all your site’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, menus, layout, etc …
  • A “theme” works independently of your website’s content. This means you can swap themes as often as you like without affecting your site’s settings.
  • Many WordPress themes provide built-in features and options that enable you to easily customize the theme’s layout and design properties and create a unique look to suit your taste.
  • Many WordPress themes are built using a framework that allows users to update the theme to a newer theme version without losing any unique customizations (e.g. CSS styles)
  • WordPress lets you search, import, install and update WordPress Themes automatically inside your site’s administration interface.
  • Themes allow users to save thousands of dollars on web design costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WP themes are typically quite affordable.

Responsive WP Theme Design

Many theme developers are now creating themes that incorporate “responsive” design.

A responsive theme enables a website to automatically reconfigure the layout to display smoothly over different screen sizes and resolutions, as well as different devices (e.g. computers, tablets, smart phones, etc.) …

Understanding WP Themes

A responsive theme is also optimized for different types of devices. Users can navigate, read and load the site on various device browsers without having to resize anything, or requiring the website owner to install additional browser elements.

Note: When selecting, WordPress themes, it’s a good idea to choose a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that the content and layout of your site works on your visitors’ devices, it also means that the theme is newer than most non-responsive themes and therefore probably complies with the latest standards of website design coding.

I hope this overview has given you a better understanding of themes, what WordPress themes are, how WP themes can help you save money on website development costs, and how WordPress themes make customizing web sites easy.

In our next article in the article series on understanding basic features and functionality of WordPress, we show you where to search for great WordPress themes for your blog.

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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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