Flexible website management platforms like WordPress have effectively improved web design and web development for anyone wanting a website.
This is a great thing for non-technical users that want an online presence that they can fully manage themselves.
Prior to “blogging” and the development of user-friendly content management systems, if you needed to get a professional web site built for your business, you would have to wait until both the website development and web design processes were completely done. This could take many weeks, even many months!
WordPress themes have changed all this. In this blog post, we explain what WordPress themes are, how WP themes can help you and your business save money, and how WP themes make it easy to customize your WP site.
Web Design Revolution
More website owners have been benefiting from a revolutionary change in web design that began shortly after websites were first introduced. If you are a small business owner, you will want to know more about this, because it can save you a lot of time and money on website development or website design costs.
Very briefly, here’s how things used to work in “traditional” web development before WordPress was introduced:
The first step would be to meet with a website development company or designer for a brief. Next, the design would be discussed and agreed upon. This required spending time and money with a professional website designer discussing elements of the website like the, colors, styles, page elements, content, etc.
Every page of your web site then had to be individually created with all of the elements and codes inserted into your content. The pages were then assembled into a web site using links and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, along with every other file required to make your site work – script libraries, images, media, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything passed testing and functioned the way it was intended to (and looking the way the client had imagined it to look), was the site considered to be completed and ready for delivery.
The next stage in the evolution of web design was the introduction of “website templating elements”. A web template allows presentation elements of the web site to be created separately from the page content. Having templates helped to make the process of building websites faster and resulted in lowered costs of production. This also enabled web site developers and designers to service small business clients and clients with less money to spend …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of businesses adopting “template-based” web design services increased, templates were designed that provided expanding custom options, such as the option to choose different colours, styles, layouts
As websites and web building tools developed, website templates also began evolving into website template ”systems”, letting website owners and web designers control the design elements of a site.
And then, a “blogging” software called WordPress came along and helped to kick off a new digital 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:
WordPress Themes
WordPress themes push the idea of a website templating system even further.
A WordPress theme controls and integrates the design elements of a website. It allows you to add a “skin” over your entire site in a similar way that a website template system does but also gives you complete control over the management and customization aspects of all template settings.
As WordPress puts it …
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 in the quote above, one of the unique and revolutionary features of the WordPress theme is that how your web site appears to site visitors externally in no way affects your site’s content management aspects.
Basically, what this means is that you can modify the appearance of your site as much and as often as you like without affecting your website’s content and all the work you’ve put into it. For example, if you have set up WP site for e-commerce, changing the entire look of the site with another theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of your site. All e-commerce features, site and plugin settings and product information will remain intact, but the site will look completely different.
This is huge! Why?
Because with WordPress, you no longer need to spend weeks or months waiting for your site to be completed. You can get your website built simply and start with any theme you like, and then customize the entire look, feel and design of your site in minutes, whenever you choose … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily install a theme on your WP site without requiring web code programming skills. Just choose a theme you want, upload it to your site and activate it. WordPress lets you change your entire site’s web design and customize elements like header images, page layout, style settings and more in a few seconds …
As WordPress is distributed as open source software, web designers can design themes specifically for the WP CMS platform using the WP template system.
This means that thousands of great WP themes are made available to WP users. WordPress are usually distributed for FREE under the terms of the GNU General Public License Definition, or sold as Premium (paid) themes.
The WordPress development team maintains a FREE WordPress Theme Directory which gives WordPress users access thousands of excellent website templates at no cost …
(WordPress.org – WordPress Themes Directory)
As more users turn to WordPress for publishing and managing their digital presence, more designers are now focusing on creating themes for a wider audience of WordPress site owners.
WP themes vary from bare-looking, to elegant designs that are impressive and would typically cost hundreds to thousands of dollars to create. Surprisingly, most premium themes can be bought fairly cheaply, especially when you compare the price to what it would have cost you if a website designer had to build it from scratch.
You can view a number of theme galleries containing various examples of WP themes in this post:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits Of Using Themes
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of using WordPress themes over choosing web development applications that require traditional web template design:
Really Easy To Install
Themes are very easy to install on your site. Simply upload it to your Plugin folder via your WP admin user login and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the free WP theme repository at WordPress.org) directly inside your WP site’s admin area.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a thriving community of professional theme developers and development companies who, collectively, make thousands of great-looking, high quality WP Themes available to users. Thousands of these themes are completely free to use!
- Themes give sites a consistent design across all of your site’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your site’s content. This makes it possible to swap the “look and feel” of your templates as often as you like without affecting the blog settings.
- Many themes come with built-in features and options that allow you to customize the theme’s style, layout and design elements and create a unique look to suit your needs.
- Many WP themes are built using a framework that lets users upgrade themes to a newer theme version without losing any unique customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress lets you search, import, install and update WordPress Themes automatically directly from within the site’s administration interface.
- WP themes lets you save thousands of dollars on web development costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are normally very affordable.
About Responsive WordPress Theme Design
Many theme designers are now developing themes that incorporate “responsive” web design.
A responsive theme allows websites to automatically readjust the web layout to display smoothly across different screen sizes and resolutions, as well as across different devices (e.g. computers, tablets, smart phones, etc.) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for each platform. Users can navigate, read and display the site on most if not all devices without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring website owners to have installed additional display elements.
Note: When searching for WordPress themes, we strongly recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the 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 most non-responsive themes and therefore should comply with the latest standards, practices and techniques of web design and web coding.
Hopefully, the above overview has given you a clearer understanding about themes, what themes are, how themes can help your business save money, and how WP themes make customizing web sites easy.
To learn where to search for the best WordPress themes for your website, see this page: Finding The Best Premium And Free WordPress Web Templates On The Net.
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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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