The development of powerful website management systems like the WordPress CMS platform has effectively simplified web design and web development for anyone wanting a website.
This is a great thing for entrepreneurial-minded people thinking about building a website that they can fully manage themselves.
Prior to blogging and the development of advanced content management systems, if you needed to build a professional web site for your business, you normally would have to wait until both the website development and web design processes were fully completed. This process could mean weeks, sometimes even months of waiting around!
The introduction of WordPress themes helped change all this. In this post, we look at what WordPress themes are, how they can help you and your business save money on web development costs, and how themes make it easy to customize your WP site.
The Evolution Of Website Design
More businesses today will benefit from a tremendous change in web design that began shortly after websites were first introduced. If you own a business, you will want to learn more about this, because it could save you thousands of dollars on web development and website design costs.
In a nutshell, here’s how things used to work in “traditional” web development before a CMS system like WordPress came along:
First, you would meet with a website developer or designer for a brief. Then, the design of your website itself would be decided upon. This required time being spent with a professional web site designer discussing design elements of the web site such as the layout, colours, formats, visual elements, content, etc.
Each page of your website then had to be individually created with all your design elements and scripts coded into the content. All the pages were then assembled into a web site using links and navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with all other files required to make your website work – script libraries, graphic images, media, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only after everything passed testing and performed how it was intended to (and looking how the client had imagined it to look), was the web site considered to be finished and ready to go live.
The next step in the evolution of business web design was the introduction of “website templating elements”. A website template allows presentation elements of the website to be created separately from content on the page. The introduction of template elements helped speed up the process of developing websites and resulted in reduced costs of production. This also enabled web site developers and designers to service business clients and clients with smaller budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of businesses choosing “template-based” web design services increased, web templates were created to offer clients with different customization features and options, such as colour palettes, the ability to select different formats or page layouts, and so on.
As websites and website editor software evolved, website templates also began transforming into website templating “systems” that let website owners control their web site’s design components.
Then, a “blogging” application called WordPress was introduced 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:
About WordPress Themes
A WordPress theme pushes the idea of a website template system one step further.
The WP theme system controls and unifies every aspect of your web site design. It lets you add a “skin” to your entire site in a similar way that a web template system does but it gives you more control over the management, appearance and ability to customize your site’s 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 the above states, a unique feature of a WP theme is that the way your site displays to site visitors does not affect the way your site functions in the backend to handle areas like content management and functionality.
In plain English terms, what this means is that themes let you modify the look and feel of your website as much and as often as you want without touching your site’s content and all the work you’ve put into it. For example, if your site has been configured for e-commerce, changing the entire look of the site with a different theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of your web site. All e-commerce features, settings and product information will remain intact, but the site will look completely different.
Why is this such a big deal?
Because when you use WordPress, you no longer have to wait until your website’s design is done. You can get your business website built quickly and get started with any theme you want, and then modify the entire look, feel and design of your site in minutes, whenever you choose … and as many times as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your WP site with no web code programming skills necessary. Just choose any WordPress theme you want, upload it to your site and activate it. WordPress lets you change your website design and modify elements like headers, layout, style settings and more in less than a few minutes …
Because WordPress is made available as open source software, web designers from all over the world can create themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WP templating system.
This means that loads of great WP themes can be downloaded by WordPress users. WordPress are normally distributed as Free Software under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or they can be purchased as Premium (paid) WordPress themes.
The WordPress development team maintains a FREE WordPress Theme Directory which allows WordPress users to download and access, thousands of excellent themes completely free of charge …
(WordPress.org – WP Themes Directory)
As the popularity of WordPress increases, more designers are now focused on creating themes for a wider audience of WordPress site owners.
WP themes vary from corporate-looking, to jaw-dropping designs that are simply spectacular and could easily cost thousands of dollars to design. Surprisingly, WordPress themes are really inexpensive.
You can see several WordPress theme galleries that include various examples of WordPress themes here:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Themes – Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using WordPress themes over using traditional website design:
WP Theme Installation Is Easy
Themes are quite easy to install on your site. Just upload a zip folder that contains the plugin to your Plugin folder via your WP dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the WordPress themes repository at WordPress.org) directly from within your WP site’s admin area.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a large community of professional web developers who make thousands of quality WP Themes available to users. And many of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent “look and feel” across all of your site’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, layouts, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your site’s content. This allows you change themes as often as you like without deleting the site’s underlying data.
- Many WP themes provide additional built-in features and options that enable you to easily customize your theme’s layout, style and design properties and create a unique look to suit your needs.
- Many themes are built using a framework that allows you to upgrade the theme to newer theme versions without losing any unique customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress lets you search, upload, install and update WordPress Themes automatically right inside the dashboard.
- WordPress themes allow WP users to save hundreds, even thousands of dollars on website design costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WP themes are normally quite inexpensive.
About Responsive Themes
Many WordPress theme developers are now developing “responsive” themes for WordPress.
A responsive theme enables websites to automatically reconfigure the layout to display smoothly over different screen sizes and resolutions, as well as across different devices (e.g. PCs, tablets, mobile phones, etc.) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for each device type. 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 tools.
Note: When purchasing WordPress themes, it’s a good idea to choose a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that your web site will display correctly on all devices, it also means that the theme is newer than most non-responsive themes and therefore probably complies with the latest standards and practices of web design.
We hope this overview has helped you gain a clearer understanding of WP themes, what WP themes are, how they can help you and your business save money on website development costs, and how themes let you easily customize a website.
In the next blog post on understanding basic features and functionality of WordPress, we show you where to search for great themes for your website or blog.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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