Advanced website publishing systems like the WordPress CMS have truly improved web design and web development for anyone wanting a website.
This is fantastic news for business owners planning on getting a digital presence that is relatively simple and easy to manage.
Prior to blogging and the introduction of powerful CMS software, if you wanted a professional website, you typically had to wait until both the website development and website design processes were completely done. This could mean waiting around for many weeks, sometimes even many months!
The introduction of WordPress themes changed all this. In this blog post, you will learn what WordPress themes are, how they help your business save money, and how themes allow you to easily customize your WP site.
A New Development In Web Design
More businesses will benefit from a revolution in website design that has been going for a number of years now. If you own a small business, you will want to learn about this, because it can save your business thousands of dollars on web development or web design costs.
In a nutshell, this is what happened before software like WordPress were developed:
The first step would be to meet with a website development firm or web designer for a brief. Next, the “web design” itself would be decided upon. This required spending time and money with a professional website designer going over areas of the website like the layout, colours, styles, visual elements, content, etc.
Each page of your website then had to be individually created with the design elements and codes written into the page content. The 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 required to make your site work – script libraries, graphic images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only after everything passed testing and functioned how it was supposed to (and looking the way the client had imagined it to look), was the web site deemed to have been finished and ready to go live.
The next step in the evolution of website design was the introduction of “website templates”. A web site template allows the design of the web site to be created separately from content on the page. The development of templates helped to make the process of web site development faster and resulted in lowered production costs. This also allowed website designers to expand their services to include business clients and clients with less money to spend on marketing …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of businesses adopting “template-based” web design services increased, templates started being introduced that offered various custom options, like the ability to switch colours, styles, layouts
As web sites and website editing software developed, web templates also started to evolve into website templating ”systems”, permitting users to customize the visual components of their web site.
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:
The WordPress Theme
A WordPress theme takes website template systems much further.
A WP theme controls and unifies all of the design aspects of your website. It lets you add a “skin” to your site much like a template system does but also gives you more control over the management, presentation and customization of all 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 stated in the quote above, one of the unique features of WordPress is that the way your site looks to visitors in no way affects the management of your content.
Basically, what this means is that WP themes let you change the design of your site as often as you want without affecting your site’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if you have set up your website for e-commerce, changing the entire look of the site with another theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of your web site. All e-commerce features, site settings and product information will remain unaffected, but the site will look completely different.
Why is this important?
Because when your website is powered with WordPress, you no longer need to wait until your site’s web design is done. You can get your website built simply and start with any WP theme you like, and then completely modify the look, feel and design of your site in a few minutes, whenever you decide … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your site with no website code programming knowledge necessary. Simply choose a theme you like, upload it to your site and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your web design and customize elements like header images, page layout, style settings and more in minutes …
As WordPress is made available as open source software, website designers from all over the world can create themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WordPress template system.
This means that thousands of high quality WP themes are made available to WordPress users. WordPress are generally distributed as Free Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License Definition, or sold as Premium (i.e. paid) themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE WordPress Theme Directory which allows WordPress users to access thousands of great WordPress themes for free …
(WordPress.org – Free Theme Directory)
As more users turn to WordPress for publishing and managing their content online, more designers are now focusing on developing themes for a wider audience of WordPress site owners.
Themes vary from bare-looking, to designs that are simply stunning and would normally cost many hundreds of dollars to create. Surprisingly, most premium themes are fairly inexpensive to purchase.
You can view a number of theme galleries that include various examples of WP themes here:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits And Advantages Of Using Themes
Here are just a few of the benefits of using WordPress themes over choosing applications that require traditional web design:
Be Up And Running In Minutes
WP themes are quite easy to install on your site. Simply upload it to your Plugin folder via your WordPress dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the free WordPress theme repository at WordPress.org) directly inside your WP dashboard.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a growing community of professional theme designers who, collectively, make thousands of great WordPress Themes available to users. Many of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent “look and feel” across all your blog’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, menus, layout, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your blog’s content. This means you can swap WordPress themes as often as you like without changing the site content.
- Many WordPress themes provide built-in functionality and settings that enable you to customize the theme’s layout, style and design properties and create a unique look to suit your preferences.
- Many themes are built using a framework that allows you to upgrade themes to newer theme versions without losing its unique customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress lets you search, upload, install and update WordPress Themes automatically directly from your dashboard.
- Themes helps you save thousands of dollars on website design costs. Free WordPress themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are typically quite inexpensive.
About Responsive WP Themes
Many WordPress theme designers are now developing themes that incorporate “responsive” web design.
A responsive theme allows websites to automatically readjust the web layout to display smoothly across different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as across different platforms) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for each device type. Users can navigate, read and display the site on various devices without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring website owners to install additional browser elements.
Note: When downloading WordPress themes, it’s a good idea to choose a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that your web site will work correctly across all of your visitors’ devices, but it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore complies with the latest standards and practices of website design and coding.
We hope that this overview has given you a better understanding of WordPress themes, what themes are, how themes can help you and your business save money, and how WP themes allow you to easily customize your WP site.
In the next blog post on basic features and functionality of WordPress, we show you where to find great themes for your website.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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