The development of website publishing tools like the WordPress CMS has truly improved web design and web development for users.
This is terrific news for businesses wanting to start a website that they can fully manage.
Prior to “blogging” and the development of powerful and effective CMS solutions, if you needed to get a professional site built for your business, you would have to wait until both the website development and website design processes were completely done. This process could mean weeks, even months of waiting for the work to be done!
The development of WordPress themes helped change all this. In this post, we explain what WP themes are, how they help you and your business save money, and how themes allow you to easily customize your WordPress site.
A Revolution In Web Site Design
Businesses will benefit from a revolutionary change in web design that has been going for several years now. If you own a business, you will want to learn about this, because it can save your business thousands of dollars on web development and website design costs.
In a nutshell, this is how things worked in “traditional” website development before CMS solutions like WordPress were developed:
First, you would meet with a website development firm or designer for a brief. After that, the design had to be discussed and agreed upon. This meant time and money being spent with someone with web design skills going over things of the web site such as the layout, colours, styles, visual elements, content, etc.
Each page of your website then had to be hand-coded with all of your elements and scripts coded into the content. The pages were then assembled into a web site using hyperlinks and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, along with all other files required to make your site work – script libraries, graphic images, media, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only after everything passed testing and performed the way it should (and looking the way a client had wanted it to look), was the web site considered to be completed and ready for delivery.
Then, website “templates” came along”. A website template allows the presentation of the website to be worked on separately from content on the page. Having ready-made templates helped speed up the web creation process and resulted in lowered production costs. This also allowed website development firms to work with business clients with smaller marketing budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of small businesses using “template-based” websites increased, templates started being created that offered clients with a range of custom options, such as color palettes, the ability to specify different formats and elements, etc …
As web sites and web building applications developed, web templates also started evolving into web template “systems” that enable website owners and website developers to control their website’s design aspects.
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
A WordPress theme pushes web template systems even further.
A WP theme controls and integrates the design areas of the website. It allows you to add a “skin” to your site much like a web template system does but it also also gives you complete control over the management, presentation and customization aspects of all template settings.
As the official WordPress site explains …
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, a unique and revolutionary feature of WordPress is that how your site looks to site visitors on the outside in no way affects the management of your content.
Basically, what this means is that a WP theme lets you modify the appearance of your site as often as you want without modifying your website’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if your site has been configured for e-commerce, changing the entire look of the site with a different 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 unaffected, but the site will look completely different.
This is important. Why?
Because when you use WordPress, you no longer have to spend weeks or months waiting for your website design to be done. You can get your business website built quickly and get started with any WP theme you like, and completely modify the look, feel and design of your site in mere seconds, whenever you choose … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily install a theme on your WP site with no web design knowledge required. Just choose a WP theme you want, upload it to your website and activate it. WordPress lets you change your website design and modify elements like headers, layout, typography and more in less than a few minutes …
Since WordPress is distributed as open source software, web designers can design themes specifically for the WP CMS platform using the WP templating system.
This means that loads of high quality WordPress themes are made available to WP users. Themes are normally distributed for Free under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or they can be purchased as Premium (paid) WordPress themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE theme directory which gives WordPress users access thousands of excellent website templates for free …
(WordPress.org – Themes Directory)
As the popularity of WordPress increases, more designers are now starting to create themes for a wider audience of WordPress site owners.
WP themes range from minimal-looking, to designs that are quite stunning and would typically cost hundreds to many thousands of dollars to design. Surprisingly, themes can be bought fairly cheaply, especially when compared to what it would have cost you if a web designer had to create it from scratch.
You can view several theme galleries containing many examples of great premium themes in this post:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
WP Themes – Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of choosing WordPress themes over using traditional website design:
Easy To Install
Themes are really easy to install on your site. Simply upload it to your Plugins folder via your admin login and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the WP themes repository at WordPress.org) directly inside your WordPress dashboard.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a large community of commercial website designers who contribute thousands of fantastic 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 site’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, menus, layout, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your digital content. This means you can swap themes as often as you want without modifying the site’s content.
- Many WordPress themes provide additional functionality and options that enable you to easily customize the site’s style and design properties and create a unique look to suit your business.
- Many themes are built using a framework that lets you upgrade the theme to newer theme versions without losing any unique customizations (e.g. CSS styles)
- WordPress lets you search, upload, install and update WordPress Themes automatically directly from your admin panel.
- WP themes allow users to save hundreds of dollars on website design costs. Free WP themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WordPress themes are typically quite inexpensive.
Responsive WP Themes
Many theme developers are now creating “responsive” themes for WordPress.
A responsive theme enables websites to automatically resize to display smoothly across different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as different platforms) …
Responsive themes are also optimized for each platform. Users can scroll, read and display the site on various device platforms without having to resize anything, or requiring the website owner to have installed additional browser elements.
Note: When searching for 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 will display correctly across all of your visitors’ devices, 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 website design and coding.
We hope this overview has given you a clearer understanding about WP themes, what themes are, how themes help you save money, and how themes let you easily customize a site.
In the next article in our article series for new WP users on understanding basic WordPress features, we show you where to find great WP themes for your blog.
***
"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
***