The development of website publishing applications like WordPress has truly improved web design and web development for business owners.
This is terrific news for entrepreneurial-minded people that want a website that is relatively easy to manage.
Prior to “blogging” and the development of powerful and simple content management systems, if you needed a professional web site, you would have to wait until both the web development and website design processes were completely done. This could mean waiting around for many weeks, even many months!
WordPress themes changed all this. In this article, you will learn what themes are, how they can help you save money, and how themes allow you to easily customize your site.
Website Design Revolution
Businesses are benefiting from a revolutionary change in website design that started several years ago. If you own a business, you will want to know more about this, because it could save you a lot of time and money on web development and web design costs.
Very briefly, this is what happened before CMS software like WordPress were developed:
The first step would be to meet with a web development firm or designer for a brief. After this, the “web design” itself had to be discussed and agreed upon. This meant time being spent with a professional web designer going over areas of the website such as the layout, colors, styles, graphic elements, content, etc.
Every page of your web site then had to be hand-coded with the design elements and codes inserted into your page content. All the pages were then assembled into a website using links and navigation menus and uploaded to your server, along with all other files required to make your website work – script libraries, images, media elements, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only after everything passed testing and functioned the way it was supposed to (and looking how a client had wanted it to look), was the website considered as being finished and ready to go live.
The next stage in the evolution of business website design was the introduction of “website templates”. A website template allows the presentation of the web site to be created separately from the page content. The development of template elements helped to make the process of web site development faster and resulted in lowered costs of production. This also enabled web site development firms to service smaller businesses with less money to spend on marketing …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As more businesses started adopting “template-based” websites, web templates started being created to provide different customization options, such as color palettes, the ability to select different menu styles and header, footer and navigation elements, etc …
As websites and website building applications evolved, website templates also started evolving into website templating “systems” that enabled users and web developers to control their site’s design aspects.
Then, a “blogging” tool called WordPress was developed and helped to kick off a new website 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
WordPress themes drive the idea of a website templating system even further.
A WordPress theme controls all of the design elements of your web site. It allows you to add a “skin” over your entire site much like a web template system does but it gives you more control over the management, presentation and ability to customize template options.
As described 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 the above states, a unique and revolutionary feature of WordPress is that how your site displays to site visitors on the outside is managed separately from your site’s functionality and content management.
In simple terms, what this means is that themes let you modify the design 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 your site has been configured for e-commerce, changing the entire look of your site with a different theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of your website. All e-commerce features, settings and product information will remain intact, but your site will look completely different.
Why is this such a big deal?
Because with WordPress, you no longer have to spend weeks or months waiting for your website to be done. You can get your website built quickly and get started with any theme you want, and completely edit the look, feel and design of your WordPress site in a few seconds, whenever you decide … and as many times as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your site with no website code programming skills necessary. Just pick a WP theme you want, upload it to your website and activate it. WordPress lets you change your website design and customize elements like header images, page layout, typography and more with just a few mouse clicks …
Because WordPress is made available as open source software, professional web design companies can create themes specifically for the WordPress CMS platform using the WP templating system.
This means that loads of great WP themes can be downloaded by WP users. WordPress are generally distributed for FREE under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or they can be purchased as Premium (paid) WordPress themes.
The WordPress development team maintains a FREE directory of WordPress themes which allows WordPress users to download and access, thousands of excellent WordPress themes completely free of charge …
(WordPress.org – Themes Directory)
As the popularity of WordPress increases, more designers are now starting to develop themes for a wider audience of WordPress site owners.
WP themes vary from functional-looking, to stylish designs that are simply stunning and could easily cost many hundreds of dollars to develop. Surprisingly, themes are really inexpensive.
You can see a number of theme galleries that include various examples of great WP themes here:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
WP Themes – Benefits
Here are just some of the many benefits and advantages of choosing WordPress themes over using tools that require traditional website design:
Quick Installation
Themes are really easy to install on your site. Just upload it to your Plugins folder via your dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the theme directory at WordPress.org) directly from within your WordPress site’s admin area.
Additionally …
- WordPress has a growing community of professional web developers and development companies who, collectively, make thousands of fantastic WordPress Themes available to users. Thousands of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a consistent look across all of the blog’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your web site’s content. This allows you replace WordPress themes as often as you want without deleting the site information.
- Many themes provide additional built-in functionality and options that let you easily customize the site’s style, layout and design properties to create a unique look to suit your needs.
- Many WP themes are built using a framework that allows users to update the theme to newer theme versions without losing any customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress allows you to search, upload, install and update WordPress Themes automatically directly from within your admin panel.
- Themes lets you save thousands of dollars on web development costs. Free WP themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are typically quite inexpensive.
About Responsive Theme Design
Many theme designers are now developing themes that incorporate “responsive” functionality.
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 platforms) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for each device type. Users can scroll, read and display your site on various 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 the theme ensure that the content and layout of your site works on all devices, it also means that the theme is newer than most non-responsive themes and therefore complies with the latest standards and practices of website design and coding.
We hope that the above overview has helped you gain a clearer understanding about themes, what WP themes are, how WordPress themes help your business save money on web development costs, and how WordPress themes make customizing websites easy.
In the next blog post on helping you understand WP features, we show you where to search for great themes for your blog.
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