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.

Understanding ThemesAdvanced web management platforms like the WordPress CMS have truly improved web design and web development for anyone wanting a website.

This is a great thing for non-technical users thinking of running an online business presence that is relatively simple, easy and inexpensive to manage.

Prior to blogging and the introduction of advanced CMS tools, if you needed a professional business site, you had to wait until both the website development and website design processes were completely done. This process could take many weeks, sometimes even many months!

The development of WordPress themes helped change all this. In this article, we will explore what WordPress themes are, how WP themes save your business money on website design costs, and how WP themes help you easily customize your website.

Web Site Design Evolution

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

Let’s take a look at what normally happened before CMS systems like WordPress came along:

First, you would meet with a website developer or designer for a brief. Next, the actual design of your website itself had to be decided upon. This involved spending time with a professional web designer discussing elements of the site such as the, colors, formats, visual elements, content, etc.

Every page of your web site then had to be hand-coded with your elements and codes scripted into the content. All pages were then assembled together into a web site using hyperlinks and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, along with every other file needed to make your website work – script libraries, images, media elements, etc.

A Newbie's Guide To WP Themes

(image source:adobe.com)

Only once everything passed testing and was performing the way it was supposed to (and looking the way the client had wanted it to look), was the website considered as being completed and ready to go live.

The next stage in the evolution of business website design was the introduction of “website templates”. Web site templates allow presentation elements of the web site to be worked on separately from the page content. The development of templates helped speed up the web site creation process and resulted in reduced costs of production. This also enabled website designers to work with business clients with less money to spend on marketing …

Understanding Themes

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

As the number of website development companies choosing “template-based” web design services increased, templates started being designed that could offer various customization settings, like color palettes, the ability to specify different layouts or menu styles, etc …

As web sites and web building tools evolved, web templates also began transforming into website templating ”systems”, letting website owners control the visual elements of a website.

And then, a “blogging” software called WordPress was introduced and helped to start a new digital publishing revolution …

WordPress Themes - An Overview

(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 the idea of a website templating system much further.

The WordPress theme system controls and unifies the design areas of your website. It allows you to add a “skin” over your site similarly to what a web template system does but it also also gives you more control over the management, appearance and customization of template options.

According to 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 stated above, one of the unique features of WordPress is that the way your web site looks to site visitors on the outside in no way affects your site’s content management settings.

In simple terms, what this means is that a theme lets you change the look and feel of your website as much and as often as you want without modifying your website’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if you have configured your site for e-commerce, replacing the theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of your site. All e-commerce features, site settings and product information will remain unaffected, but the site will look completely different.

This is important. Why?

Because when you use WordPress, you no longer need to spend weeks or months waiting for your website design to be done. You can get your website built simply and get started with any theme you want, and then completely customize the look, feel and design of your WordPress site in a few seconds, whenever you decide … and as often as you like!

Even better, you can easily install a theme on your site with no web code editing knowledge required. Simply choose any WordPress theme you like, upload it to your website and activate it. WordPress lets you change your site’s design and modify elements like headers, layout, typography and more in less than a few minutes …

Understanding WP Themes

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

This means that loads of high quality WordPress themes are made available to WordPress users. WordPress are generally distributed freely under the terms of the GNU General Public License Definition, or sold as Premium (i.e. paid) themes.

The WordPress development team keeps a FREE theme directory which gives WordPress users access thousands of excellent website templates at no cost …

Themes - An Introduction

(WordPress.org – 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 users.

WP themes vary from professional-looking, to designs that are quite stunning and would easily cost thousands of dollars to commission. Surprisingly, most themes can be purchased quite inexpensively, especially when compared to what it would have cost you if a website designer had to develop it from scratch.

You can see several theme galleries that include various examples of great premium themes in this article:

Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!

(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)

Benefits Of Using Themes

Here are just some of the benefits of choosing WordPress themes over using traditional web design:

Be Up And Running In No Time

WP themes are quite easy to install on your site. Just upload the plugin file to your Plugins folder via your WP dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the theme repository at WordPress.org) directly from within your WP site’s admin area.

Themes - An Overview

Additionally …

  • WordPress has a growing community of professional website designers who contribute thousands of fantastic WP Themes available to WP users. And many of these themes are 100% free to use!
  • Themes give sites a unified and consistent design across all the site’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
  • A “theme” works independently of your web site’s content. This makes it possible to swap WordPress themes as often as you need without modifying your site data.
  • Many WordPress themes come with built-in features and options that enable you to easily customize your site’s layout, style and design properties and create a unique look to suit your needs.
  • Many themes are built using a framework that enables users to upgrade the theme to a newer theme version without losing its unique customizations (e.g. styles)
  • WordPress lets you search, upload and install WordPress Themes automatically directly from your site’s administration interface.
  • Themes helps you save hundreds, even thousands of dollars on web design costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WP themes are normally quite inexpensive.

Responsive WordPress Theme Design

Many WP theme designers are now developing “responsive” WP themes.

A responsive theme allows a website to automatically readjust screen size to display smoothly across different screen sizes and resolutions, as well as across different devices (e.g. computers, tablets, mobile phones, etc.) …

A Newbie's Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes

A responsive theme is also optimized for different types of devices. Users can navigate, read and display a site on all device platforms without having to resize anything, or requiring the website owner to have installed additional browser elements.

Note: When searching for WordPress themes, we recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that your web site displays well on all devices, it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore should comply with the latest standards and practices of website design and web coding.

We hope that this article has provided you with a clearer understanding of WP themes, what WP themes are, how they help your business save money, and how WP themes make customizing web sites easy.

In the next blog post in the article WP newbies on understanding basic WP features, we show you where to search for the best WP 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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