The development of web site management platforms like the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) has effectively simplified web design and web development for business users.
This is a great thing for entrepreneurial-minded people planning to start a website that they can easily manage themselves.
Before blogging and the development of user-friendly content management systems, if you wanted to build a professional web site for your business, you had to wait until both the web development and web design processes were fully completed. This process could mean waiting for weeks, sometimes even many months!
WordPress themes have changed all this. In this article, you will learn what themes are, how they can help you and your business save money, and how WP themes help you easily customize your website.
A New Development In Web Site Design
Businesses have been benefiting from a great change in web design that has been going for several years now. If you are a business owner, you may want to learn more about this, because it could save you thousands of dollars on website development or website design costs.
In a nutshell, here’s how things worked in “traditional” website development before WordPress came along:
First, you would discuss your requirements with a website developer or web site designer. Next, the “web design” would be decided upon. This meant time being spent with someone with web site design skills going over things of the web site like the layout, colors, styles, visual elements, content, etc.
Each page of your site then had to be hand-coded with your elements and codes inserted into your content. All of the pages were then assembled into a web site using hyperlinks and navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with all other files required to make your site work – script libraries, images, media, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only after everything passed testing and functioned the way it should (and looking the way a client had imagined it to look), was the site considered to have been finished and ready to go live.
The next phase in the evolution of web design was the introduction of “website templates”. A website template allows the ”look and feel” of the web site to be created separately from the page content. Having templates helped speed up the process of developing web sites and resulted in reduced costs of production. This also enabled website development companies to service businesses and clients with less money to spend on marketing …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As more businesses began adopting “template-based” websites, web templates started being designed to provide different custom settings, like the ability to switch colors, styles, layouts
As websites and website editor applications evolved, web templates also started to evolve into website template ”systems”, permitting website owners to customize their site’s design components.
And then, a “blogging” tool called WordPress was developed 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 drives the idea of a web template system further.
A WordPress theme controls and unifies every aspect of your website design. It lets you add a “skin” over your entire site in a similar way that a template system does but it provides you with complete control over the management, presentation and ability to customize all template settings.
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 the above quote states, a unique feature of WordPress is that how your web site looks to visitors externally is kept independent of how your website works in the backend to handle areas like content management and functionality.
In simple terms, what this means is that themes let you modify the look and feel of your website as much and as often as you want without touching your website’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if WP site has been set up 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 intact, 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 WP theme you want, and then completely edit 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 site without having website code editing knowledge. Simply choose a theme you like, install it on your site and activate it. WordPress lets you change your web design and modify elements like headers, layout, typography and more in a few seconds …
As WordPress is open source software, web designers can design themes specifically for the WordPress platform using the WP template system.
This means that thousands of great WordPress themes are made available to WordPress users. Themes are normally distributed for Free under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or they can be purchased as Premium (i.e. paid) WP themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE theme directory which gives WordPress users access thousands of great web templates at $0 cost …
(WordPress.org – WordPress Themes Directory)
As more businesses turn to WordPress for publishing and managing their digital presence, more designers are now starting to develop themes for a wider audience of WordPress site owners.
WP themes range from minimal-looking, to designs that are simply breathtaking and would typically cost many hundreds of dollars to develop. Surprisingly, most themes are fairly inexpensive to buy.
You can see several WordPress theme galleries that include various examples of great premium themes here:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits Of Themes
Here are just a few of the benefits of choosing WordPress themes over using tools that require traditional web template design:
WP Theme Installation Is Easy And Simple
WordPress themes are really easy to install on your site. Just upload a zip file that contains the plugin files to your Plugins folder via your admin area and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the themes directory at WordPress.org) directly inside your WordPress admin’s “Theme” section.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a large online community of commercial theme designers and design companies who, collectively, contribute thousands of great-looking, high quality WordPress Themes available to WordPress users. Thousands of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a consistent “look and feel” across all of the blog’s elements, i.e. pages, headers, footers, menus, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your digital content. This makes it possible to change themes as often as you want without changing the website’s settings.
- Many themes provide additional built-in functionality and settings that allow you to easily customize the site’s layout, style and design properties to create a unique look to suit your preferences.
- Many themes are built using a framework that lets you upgrade the theme to a newer theme version without losing any unique customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress allows you to search, import and install WordPress Themes automatically directly from within your site’s administration interface.
- Themes lets you save hundreds, even thousands of dollars on website design costs. Free WordPress themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WordPress themes are normally quite inexpensive.
About Responsive Themes
Many WP theme developers are now creating “responsive” themes for the WordPress CMS.
A responsive theme enables websites to automatically resize to display smoothly across different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as different devices (e.g. laptops, tablets, mobile phones, etc.) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for each platform. Users can scroll, read and load the site on most if not all device platforms without having to resize anything, or requiring the website owner to have installed additional browser tools.
Note: When selecting, WordPress themes, we recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that your website will work correctly 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 and web coding.
Hopefully, the above overview has helped you gain a clearer understanding of themes, what WordPress themes are, how WP themes can help you save money on website design costs, and how themes allow you to easily customize a WordPress site.
In the next article in our article series on helping you understand features and functionality of WordPress, we show you where to search for great WordPress themes for your website or blog.
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