Advanced web publishing tools like WordPress have effectively simplified web design and web development for anyone wanting a website.
This is a great thing for businesses planning to start an online business presence that they can easily manage by themselves.
Prior to blogging and the development of powerful CMS applications, if you wanted a professional website, you had to wait until both the web development and web design processes were fully completed. This could take weeks, sometimes even many months!
WordPress themes changed all this. In this post, we explore what themes are, how they save you and your business money on web development costs, and how themes let you easily customize your site.
Web Site Design Revolution
More website owners will benefit from a revolution in web design that started a number of years ago. If you are a small business owner, you will want to learn about this, because it could save your business thousands of dollars on website development and web design costs.
Let’s go over how things typically worked in “traditional” website development before CMS tools like WordPress came along:
The first step would be to meet with a web development company or website designer for a brief. Next, the design of your website would be discussed and agreed upon. This involved time and money being spent with a professional web site designer going over areas of the site like the, colours, formats, visual elements, content, etc.
Every page of your website then had to be individually created with all the design elements and codes scripted into your content. All the pages were then assembled together into a web site using links 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, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything passed testing and performed the way it should (and looking how a client had imagined it to look), was the website deemed to be finished and ready to go live.
The next stage in the evolution of business web design was the introduction of “website templates”. A web site template allows the ”look and feel” of the web site to be worked on separately from content on the page. Having template elements helped to make creating web sites faster and resulted in reduced production costs. This also enabled web site development agencies to work with smaller businesses and clients with smaller budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As more small businesses started choosing “template-based” websites, templates were designed that could offer various customizable options, such as color palettes, the ability to pick different formats or header, footer and navigation elements, etc …
As websites and web editor applications evolved, web templates also began to transform into website templating ”systems”, letting users and web designers control their site’s visual elements.
And then, WordPress was introduced and helped to kick off a new online publishing 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 website templating systems much further.
A WordPress theme controls every aspect of your web design. It lets you add a “skin” to your entire site much like a template system does but also provides you with complete control over the management and customization of all template settings.
As explained in 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, a unique feature of WordPress is that the way your web site displays to visitors externally is kept independent of the management of your content.
In simple terms, what this means is that themes let you modify the design of your website as much and as often as you like without touching 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 your site with a different theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the site. All e-commerce features, site and plugin settings and product information will remain intact, but your site will look completely different.
This is huge! Why?
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 simply and get started with any theme you like, and completely change the look, feel and design of your site in seconds, whenever you want … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your WordPress site without having website code editing knowledge. Simply pick a theme you want, upload it to your website and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your website design and modify elements like headers, layout, styling options and more in less than a few minutes …
As WordPress is distributed as open source software, commercial website designers can create themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WordPress template system.
This means that thousands of high quality WordPress themes can be downloaded by WP users. Themes are usually distributed as Free Software under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or they can be purchased as Premium (paid) themes.
The WordPress development team maintains a FREE directory of WP themes which gives WordPress users access thousands of great WP themes at no cost …
(WordPress.org – Themes Directory)
As WordPress becomes more popular, more designers are now focused on developing themes for a wider range of applications.
Themes range from corporate-looking, to artsy designs that are impressive and could easily cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to create. Surprisingly, most WP themes can be purchased quite inexpensively, especially when compared to what it would have cost you if a web designer had to build it from scratch.
You can view a number of WP theme galleries containing many examples of themes in this page:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits & Advantages Of WP Themes
Here are just a few of the benefits of using WordPress themes over choosing web development applications that require traditional website design:
WordPress Theme Installation Is Easy
WordPress themes are really easy to install on your site. Just upload a zip file containing the plugin to your Plugin folder via your WordPress dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the WP themes repository at WordPress.org) directly from your WP admin’s “Theme” section.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a thriving online community of commercial website developers who contribute thousands of great-looking, high quality WordPress Themes available to users. Thousands of these themes are completely free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent “look and feel” across all of the blog’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, menus, layout, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your web site’s content. This means you can replace WordPress themes as often as you need without affecting your site’s underlying data.
- Many themes come with built-in functionality and settings that enable you to easily customize the theme’s style, layout and design properties to create a unique look to suit your taste.
- Many WP 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 allows you to search, import, install and update WordPress Themes automatically from your dashboard.
- WordPress themes allow users to save hundreds of dollars on website design costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WP themes are normally quite inexpensive.
Responsive WP Theme Design
Many theme developers are now creating WP themes that incorporate “responsive” design standards.
A responsive theme enables a website to automatically reconfigure the layout to display smoothly over different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as across different devices (e.g. laptops, tablets, smart phones, etc.) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for each platform. Users can navigate, read and display your site on different device browsers without having to resize anything, or requiring the website owner to install additional browser tools.
Note: When searching for 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 of your visitors’ devices, but it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore should comply with the latest standards, practices and techniques of web design and coding.
I hope that this overview has given you a clearer understanding of WordPress themes, what WordPress themes are, how they help you and your business save money on website design costs, and how themes make customizing sites easy.
To learn where to find great WP themes for your blog, go here:
***
"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
***