Powerful web publishing technologies like the WordPress CMS platform have truly improved web design and web development for web users.
This greatly benefits business owners planning to start or build a digital presence that they can fully manage by themselves.
Prior to blogging and the introduction of powerful and simple CMS technologies, if you wanted to get a site built for your business, you normally would have to wait until both the web development and web design processes were fully completed. This could take many weeks, even many months!
The development of WordPress themes changed all this. In this post, you will learn what WordPress themes are, how they help your business save money, and how WordPress themes help you easily customize your website.
A New Development In Web Design
Website owners will benefit from a great change in web design that began shortly after websites were first introduced. If you are a small business owner, you will want to know about this, because it can save your business thousands of dollars on web development and web design costs.
Let’s briefly take a look at what happened before WordPress was developed:
The first step would be to meet with a website developer or web designer for a brief. Then, the design of your site would be decided upon. This required spending time and money with a professional web site designer discussing elements of your web site such as the, colors, styles, visual elements, content, etc.
Every page of your web site then had to be hand-coded with all of your design elements and codes inserted into your page content. All pages were then assembled together into a website using hyperlinks 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 elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything had been tested and worked the way it should (and looking the way the client had imagined it to look), was the web site considered to have been finished and ready to go live.
The next phase in the evolution of business website design was the introduction of “web templates”. A web site template allows the ”look and feel” of the website to be worked on separately from content on the page. The development of ready-made templates helped to make the process of creating web sites faster and resulted in lowered costs of production. This also enabled web designers to expand their services to include business clients and clients with less money to spend …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of businesses using “template-based” web design services increased, web templates started being created to offer clients with a number of customization options, like the option to choose different colors, styles, layouts
As websites and website building software evolved, web templates also started transforming into website templating ”systems”, which permitted users to manage the design components of a website.
And then, WordPress was introduced 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:
The WordPress Theme
A WordPress theme pushes website templating systems further.
A WP theme controls and integrates every aspect of your web site design. It lets you add a “skin” to your site similarly to what a website template system does but it also also provides you with complete control over the management and customization aspects of all template features.
As per 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 in the quote above, one of the unique features of WordPress is that the way your web site looks to site visitors is managed separately from the way your content is managed.
Basically, what this means is that you can change the design of your site as often as you want without affecting your site’s content and all the work you’ve put into it. For example, if you have configured WP site for e-commerce, changing the entire look of the site with a different theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the site. All e-commerce features, plugin settings and product information will remain intact, but the site will look completely different.
This is important. Why?
Because when you use WordPress, you no longer have to wait until your site’s web design is done. You can get your business website built quickly and start with any WP theme you like, and modify the entire look, feel and design of your website in seconds, whenever you want … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your site without the need of web code development skills. Simply pick a WP theme you want, install it on your website and activate it. WordPress lets you change your website design and modify elements like headers, page layout, styling options and more in a few seconds …
Since WordPress is distributed as open source software, website design companies can design themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WordPress template system.
This means that loads of high quality WP themes can be downloaded by WP users. WP are generally distributed as Free Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License Definition, or they can be purchased as Premium (i.e. paid) themes.
The WordPress team keeps a FREE theme directory which gives WordPress users access thousands of excellent WP themes for free …
(WordPress.org – WP Themes Directory)
As WordPress becomes more popular, more designers are now starting to develop themes for a wider audience of WordPress site owners.
Themes vary from functional-looking, to designs that are simply stunning and would normally cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to create. Surprisingly, most themes can be bought fairly cheaply, especially when compared to what you would have been charged if a website designer had to build it from scratch.
You can see several theme galleries containing many examples of great premium WP themes in this page:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits & Advantages Of WordPress Themes
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using WordPress themes over choosing traditional website design:
Be Up And Running In Minutes
Themes are very easy to install on your site. Just upload the plugin file to your Plugins folder via your admin user account and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the free theme directory at WordPress.org) directly from your WP site’s admin area.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a large community of professional website designers who, collectively, contribute thousands of fantastic WP Themes available to users. Thousands of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent design across all your site’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, layout, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your digital content. This means you can replace the “look and feel” of your templates as often as you like without modifying the underlying content of your website.
- Many themes provide additional features and settings that enable you to customize your site’s layout, style and design elements and create a unique look to suit your business.
- 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. CSS styles)
- WordPress allows you to search, import, install and update WordPress Themes automatically directly from within your admin panel.
- WP themes lets you save thousands of dollars on web development costs. Free WP themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WordPress themes are normally very inexpensive.
About Responsive Themes
Many WP theme developers are now creating WordPress themes that incorporate “responsive” functionality.
A responsive theme allows a website to automatically reconfigure the layout to display smoothly across different screen sizes and resolutions, as well as different devices (e.g. PCs, tablets, cell phones, etc.) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for different types of devices. Users can scroll, read and load a site on a range of device platforms without having to resize anything, or requiring the website owner to have installed additional themes.
Note: When downloading WordPress themes, it’s a good idea to choose a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that your website will display correctly across all devices, but it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore should comply with the latest standards of web design.
We hope that the above overview has given you a clearer understanding of themes, what WordPress themes are, how WordPress themes can help you save money on web development costs, and how themes make it easy to customize your website.
To learn where to search for great themes for your blog, click here:
***
"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
***