The introduction of website management tools like WordPress has effectively improved web design and web development for web users.
This greatly benefits individuals or businesses planning to start a website that they can manage.
Before “blogging” and the development of user-friendly CMS tools, if you wanted to build a website built for your business, you normally had to wait until both the website development and web design processes were fully completed. This could mean weeks, even sometimes months of waiting for the work to be done!
WordPress themes helped change all this. In this blog post, we explore what WP themes are, how themes save your business money on web design costs, and how WordPress themes help you easily customize your website.
Web Design Revolution
Businesses are benefiting from a revolutionary change in website design that has been going for a number of years now. If you are a small business owner, you may want to know about this, because it could save you a lot of time and money on website development and web design costs.
In a nutshell, here’s how things used to work in “traditional” web design before a CMS application like WordPress was developed:
First, you would meet with a web developer or designer for a brief. After that, the actual design would be discussed and agreed upon. This meant time and money being spent with someone with web site design skills discussing areas of the website such as the, colours, styles, visual elements, content, etc.
Each page of your web site then had to be hand-coded with all of your design elements and codes written into the content. All pages were then assembled together into a web site using links and navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with all other files required to make your site work – script libraries, images, media, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only after everything had been tested and functioned the way it should (and looking the way the client had imagined it to look), was the website considered to be finished and ready for sign off.
Then, website “templates” came along”. Web templates allow presentation elements of the website to be created separately from content on the page. Having template elements helped to speed up the process of developing websites and resulted in reduced production costs. This also allowed web site development companies to work with businesses and clients with less money to spend on marketing …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of small businesses adopting “template-based” websites increased, web templates started being created to offer different customizable features and options, such as the ability to choose different colours, styles, layouts
As websites and website editor software evolved, website templates also started to transform into web templating “systems” that enable users and web developers to customize the visual aspects of their web site.
Then, a “blogging” tool called WordPress came along and helped to kick off a new content management 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 drives the concept of a website template system further.
A WordPress theme controls and integrates the design aspects of your website. It lets you add a “skin” to your entire site similarly to what a template system does but it also also gives you complete control over the management, appearance and customization aspects of your 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, a unique and revolutionary feature of a WordPress theme is that the way your web site appears to site visitors is a completely different system from the management of your content.
In simple terms, what this means is that a WP theme lets you modify the appearance of your site as much and as often as you want without affecting your website’s content and all the work you’ve put into it. For example, if WP website 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 intact, but the site will look completely different.
Why is this such a big deal?
Because with WordPress, you no longer have to spend weeks or months waiting for your site to be completed. You can get your business website built quickly and start with any theme you want, and then modify the entire look, feel and design of your WordPress site in minutes, whenever you decide … and as many times as you like!
Even better, you can easily install a theme on your site with no website code editing knowledge necessary. Just choose any WordPress theme you like, install it on your website and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your site’s design and customize elements like headers, page layout, style settings and more in minutes …
As WordPress is distributed as open source software, commercial website designers from all over the world can design themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WP template system.
This means that thousands of great WordPress themes are made available to WP users. Themes are normally distributed as Free Software under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or they can be purchased as Premium (i.e. paid) themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE theme directory which allows WordPress users to access thousands of great WP themes at $0 cost …
(WordPress.org – Free Theme Directory)
As WordPress becomes more popular, more designers are now focused on developing themes for a wider audience of WordPress users.
WP themes vary from professional-looking, to elegant designs that are quite breathtaking and could typically cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to develop. Surprisingly, most themes can be bought fairly cheaply, especially when compared to what you would have been charged if a website designer had to code it from scratch.
You can see several WP theme galleries that include stunning examples of WordPress themes in this post:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
WordPress Themes – Benefits & Advantages
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of choosing WordPress themes over choosing applications that require traditional web design:
WP Theme Installation Is Easy And Fast
Themes are very easy to install on your site. Simply upload the plugin file to your Plugins folder via your admin login and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the themes repository at WordPress.org) directly inside your WP site’s admin area.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a large community of commercial theme designers and design companies who, collectively, contribute thousands of quality WordPress Themes available to WordPress users. And many of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a consistent look across all your site’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your website’s content. This makes it possible to swap themes as often as you like without changing the blog’s underlying information.
- Many themes provide additional features and settings that let you customize the site’s style and design elements to create a unique look to suit your business.
- Many themes are built using a framework that allows users to update themes to newer theme versions without losing its unique customizations (e.g. CSS styles)
- WordPress lets you search, import, install and update WordPress Themes automatically directly from within your dashboard.
- Themes allow users to save hundreds, even thousands of dollars on website development costs. Free WP themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are typically quite inexpensive.
About Responsive Theme Design
Many WordPress theme developers are now developing themes that incorporate “responsive” design standards.
A responsive theme allows a website to automatically readjust the web layout to display smoothly across different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as across different devices (e.g. laptops, iPads, smart phones, etc.) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for each device type. Users can scroll, read and display your site on different devices without having to resize anything, or requiring website owners to have installed additional display elements.
Note: When downloading WordPress themes, we recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that your website displays well across 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 helped you gain a better understanding about WordPress themes, what themes are, how WP themes can help you save money on web design costs, and how WordPress themes make customizing your web design easy.
In the next article in the article WP beginners on understanding basic WordPress features, we show you where to find great themes for your website or blog.
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"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
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