The introduction of powerful web management applications like WordPress has truly improved web design and web development for users.
This is a great thing for businesses planning to run an online presence that is simple and easy to manage.
Before blogging and the introduction of easy-to-use content management systems, if you wanted to build a website for your business, you had to wait until both the website development and website design processes were fully completed. This process could take weeks, sometimes even many months!
The introduction of WordPress themes changed all this. In this post, you will learn what themes are, how themes help your business save money on web design costs, and how WordPress themes allow you to easily customize your website.
Website Design Evolution
More businesses are benefiting from a tremendous revolution in web design that began shortly after websites were first introduced. If you own a business, you may want to know about this, because it can save you a lot of time and money on web development and web design costs.
Let’s briefly go over what typically took place before a CMS system like WordPress came along:
First, you would discuss your requirements with a web development company or web designer. After that, the actual design itself would be discussed and agreed upon. This involved time being spent with someone with web site design skills going over design elements of your site such as the, colours, styles, page elements, content, etc.
Every page of your site then had to be individually created with all the design elements and scripts coded around the page content. All pages were then assembled into a website using hyperlinks and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with every other file required to make your website work – script libraries, graphic images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything passed testing and performed how it was intended to (and looking the way a client had imagined it to look), was the site considered to be completed and ready to go live.
Then, website “templates” were introduced”. Web site templates allow presentation elements of the website to be worked on separately from the page content. The introduction of template elements helped make developing web sites faster and resulted in lowered production costs. This also enabled web site developers to service businesses with smaller budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of businesses choosing “template-based” web design services increased, web templates started being developed that could offer a range of customizable features, like the option to choose different colors, styles, layouts
As websites and web editing tools evolved, web templates also started transforming into website template “systems” that permitted users to control the design aspects of their web site.
And then, WordPress came along and helped to kick off a new web 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 takes web template systems one step further.
A WP theme controls the design aspects of your website. It lets you add a “skin” to your site much like a template system does but also provides you with more control over the management, presentation and customization of template features.
As WordPress explains in its official 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, a unique feature of the WP theme is that how your web site appears to site visitors is a completely separate thing from the way your website works in the backend to handle areas like content management and functionality.
Basically, what this means is that a theme lets you change the appearance 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 WordPress website has been set up for e-commerce, replacing the theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the website. All e-commerce features, site and plugin settings and product information will remain unaffected, but the site will look completely different.
This is huge! Why?
Because with WordPress, you no longer have to spend weeks or months waiting for your website to be done. You can get your business website built quickly and get started with any theme you want, and modify the entire look, feel and design of your website 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 skills necessary. Just pick any theme you want, install it on your site and activate it. WordPress lets you change your site’s design and customize elements like header images, page layout, typography and more with just a couple of mouse clicks …
As WordPress is open source software, professional web designers can create themes specifically for the WordPress CMS platform using the WordPress templating system.
This means that thousands of high quality WP themes are made available to WP users. Themes are generally distributed as Free Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or sold as Premium (i.e. paid) themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE theme directory which allows WordPress users to download and access, thousands of excellent WP themes at $0 cost …
(WordPress.org – WordPress Themes Directory)
As WordPress becomes more popular, more designers are now focused on creating themes for a wider range of users.
Themes vary from minimal-looking, to artsy designs that are visually spectacular and would typically cost thousands of dollars to design. Surprisingly, most WordPress themes are very inexpensive to buy.
You can see several theme galleries that include many examples of great premium themes here:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
WordPress Themes – Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using WordPress themes over using tools that require traditional web design:
Be Up And Running In No Time
Themes are really 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 within your WP site’s admin area.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a large online community of commercial theme developers who, collectively, contribute thousands of fantastic WP Themes available to users. Many of these themes are completely free to use!
- Themes give sites a consistent design across all of your blog’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your blog’s content. This makes it possible to swap themes as often as you want without changing the site’s settings.
- Many themes provide additional built-in features and options that let you customize the theme’s layout, style and design properties and create a unique look to suit your business.
- Many WordPress themes are built using a framework that allows you to update themes to a newer theme version without losing its unique customizations (e.g. CSS styles)
- WordPress allows you to search, import and install WordPress Themes automatically from the dashboard.
- WP themes lets you save hundreds of dollars on website design costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are normally very affordable.
Responsive Themes
Many theme designers are now creating “responsive” themes.
A responsive theme allows websites to automatically resize to display smoothly across different screen sizes and resolutions, as well as across different platforms) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for different platforms. Users can navigate, read and load a site on different device browsers without having to resize anything, or requiring website owners to have installed additional browser elements.
Note: When purchasing WordPress themes, we recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that the content and layout of your site will work correctly across all devices, but it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore probably complies with the latest standards of web design coding.
Hopefully, the above overview has given you a clearer understanding about WordPress themes, what WordPress themes are, how WordPress themes can help you and your business save money, and how WP themes make customizing sites easy.
To learn where to search for the best WP themes for your website or blog, go here:
***
"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
***