The development of content management technologies like the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) has effectively improved web design and web development for business users.
This is great for businesses that want a website that they can easily manage themselves.
Before blogging and the development of easy-to-use content management systems, if you needed to build a professional web site built for your business, you had to wait until both the web development and website design processes were completely done. This process could take weeks, sometimes even many months!
WordPress themes have changed all this. In this article, we will explore what WordPress themes are, how themes help you and your business save money on website design costs, and how themes let you easily customize your site.
A New Development In Web Site Design
Website owners have been benefiting from a tremendous change in web design that began shortly after websites were first introduced. If you own a small business, you will want to know about this, because it could save you thousands of dollars on website development and web design costs.
Let’s go over how things worked in “traditional” website design before WordPress was introduced:
The first step would be to discuss your project with a web site developer or designer. After this, the design of the site would be decided upon. This involved spending time and money with a professional website designer going over areas of your web site such as the, colors, styles, page elements, content, etc.
Each page of your website then had to be hand-coded with all of the elements and scripts coded into the page content. All pages were then assembled together into a website using links and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, along with all other files required to make your website work – script libraries, graphic images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything passed testing and functioned the way it was supposed to (and looking the way the client had wanted it to look), was the website deemed to be finished and ready for sign off.
The next step in the evolution of web design was the introduction of “website templating elements”. A web template allows the design of the web site to be worked on separately from the page content. The introduction of template elements helped to speed up the website development process and resulted in lowered costs of production. This also enabled web designers to expand their services to include small businesses with smaller marketing budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of small businesses adopting “template-based” websites increased, templates started being developed to offer expanding custom features, like the ability to choose different colors, styles, layouts
As web sites and web editor software developed, website templates also started to transform into web templating ”systems”, enabling website owners to customize the visual components of a web site.
And then, WordPress came along and helped to start 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 take web templating systems even further.
A WordPress theme controls all of the design aspects 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 it gives you more control over the management, presentation and customization of all template features.
As the official WordPress site explains 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 the above quote states, one of the unique and revolutionary features of WordPress is that the way your site looks to site visitors does not affect the management of your content.
In plain English terms, what this means is that themes let you change the look and feel of your site as often as you want without touching your site’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if WP site has been configured for e-commerce, changing the entire look of your site with another theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the web site. All e-commerce features, 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 site to be done. You can get your website built simply and get started with any theme you want, and customize the entire look, feel and design of your website in mere minutes, whenever you decide … and as many times as you like!
Even better, you can easily install a theme on your WordPress site with no web code development knowledge necessary. Just pick a theme you like, install it on your site and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your site’s design and modify elements like headers, layout, style settings and more in a few seconds …
As WordPress is distributed as open source software, thousands of website designers all around the world can design themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WordPress template system.
This means that thousands of great WP themes are made available to WP users. WordPress are generally 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 theme directory which gives WordPress users access thousands of great WordPress themes at $0 cost …
(WordPress.org – WordPress Themes Directory)
As WordPress becomes more popular, more designers are now starting to create themes for a wider audience of web users.
WordPress themes range from functional-looking, to designs that are visually stunning and could normally cost hundreds to thousands of dollars to create. Surprisingly, most themes are quite inexpensive.
You can see several theme galleries containing many examples of themes in this page:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits Of Using Themes
Here are just a few of the benefits of using WordPress themes over using traditional website design:
Be Up And Running In Very Little Time
Themes are really easy to install on your site. Simply upload it to your Plugins folder via your WordPress dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the themes repository at WordPress.org) directly from within your WordPress admin’s “Theme” section.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a large community of professional theme designers and design companies who, collectively, make thousands of excellent WP Themes available to WordPress users. Thousands of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent design across all your blog’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, layouts, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your blog’s content. This means you can replace WP themes as often as you need without changing the underlying content of your web site.
- Many WordPress themes come with additional built-in features and settings that enable you to customize your theme’s style, layout and design elements to create a unique look to suit your needs.
- Many themes are built using a framework that lets you update themes to newer theme versions without losing its unique customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress lets you search, upload, install and update WordPress Themes automatically right within the dashboard.
- WordPress themes lets you save thousands of dollars on web development costs. Free WordPress themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WP themes are normally quite inexpensive.
About Responsive Theme Design
Many theme developers are now creating “responsive” themes for the WordPress CMS.
A responsive theme enables a website to automatically resize to display smoothly across different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as different platforms) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for different types of devices. Users can navigate, read and display your site on all device browsers without having to resize anything, or requiring the website owner to install additional browser elements.
Note: When purchasing WordPress themes, it’s a good idea to choose a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that your website works on your visitors’ devices, it also means that the theme is newer than most non-responsive themes and therefore probably complies with the latest standards, practices and techniques of website design coding.
Hopefully, the above overview has given you a clearer understanding of themes, what WordPress themes are, how themes help you and your business save money on web development costs, and how WordPress themes allow you to easily customize a WordPress site.
To learn where to find the best WordPress themes for your blog, see this page: How To Find The Best Premium And Free WordPress Themes On The Net.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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