The development of flexible website publishing tools like WordPress has effectively improved web design and web development for business owners.
This is great for individuals or businesses planning on getting a web presence that is simple, easy and inexpensive to manage.
Prior to “blogging” and the development of powerful content management systems, if you needed a business site, you typically would have to wait until both the web development and website design processes were fully completed. This could take many weeks, sometimes even months!
WordPress themes changed all this. In this blog post, you will learn what themes are, how they save you money on website design costs, and how WP themes make it easy to customize your WordPress site.
A Revolution In Web Site Design
More businesses will benefit from a great change in website design that has been going for a number of years now. If you are a small business owner, you will want to learn about this, because it could save you a lot of time and money on website development and website design costs.
In a nutshell, here’s what used to happen before tool like WordPress was developed:
The first step would be to meet with a web developer or designer for a brief. After this, the actual “web design” itself had to be discussed and agreed upon. This meant time being spent with a professional web designer going over design elements of the site such as the, colours, styles, graphic elements, content, etc.
Each page of your website then had to be individually created with the design elements and codes written into the 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 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 worked the way it should (and looking the way the client had imagined it to look), was the website considered to have been finished and ready for sign off.
Then, web design “templates” came along”. A web template allows presentation elements of the website to be worked on separately from the page content. The introduction of templates helped speed up the process of developing web sites and resulted in lowered costs of production. This also enabled web site developers to expand their services to include smaller business clients and clients with smaller budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As the number of small businesses using “template-based” web design services increased, web templates started being designed to offer clients with expanding customizable settings, like the ability to switch colors, styles, layouts
As websites and web editing tools evolved, web templates also began to evolve into website templating ”systems”, permitting website owners to manage the design components of their website.
Then, WordPress was introduced and helped to start a new web 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 expands web templating systems much further.
The WordPress theme system controls the design elements of a web site. It allows you to add a “skin” to your site in a similar way that a template system does but it also also gives you more control over the management and customization aspects of all template options.
As WordPress puts 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 stated above, one of the unique and revolutionary features of WordPress is that how your web site displays to site visitors is a completely different thing from how your website functions in the backend to handle areas like content management and functionality.
In simple terms, what this means is that you can change the appearance of your site as often as you like without modifying your site’s content and all the functionality you’ve built into it. For example, if you have configured WordPress website for e-commerce, changing the entire look of the site with another theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of your website. All e-commerce features, site settings and product information will remain unaffected, but the site will look completely different.
This is huge! Why?
Because when you use WordPress, you no longer need to spend weeks or months waiting for your site to be completed. You can get your business website built quickly and start with any WordPress theme you like, and then completely change the look, feel and design of your WordPress site in a few minutes, whenever you choose … and as often as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your site without the need of website code development knowledge. Simply pick a WP theme you like, install it on your website and activate it. WordPress lets you change your entire site’s web design and customize elements like headers, layout, typography and more in minutes …
Because WordPress is open source software, website designers from all over the world can create themes specifically for the WP CMS platform using the WP templating system.
This means that loads of great WP themes can be downloaded by WordPress users. Themes are usually distributed for Free under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or sold as Premium (paid) themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE WordPress Theme Directory which allows WordPress users to access thousands of excellent themes for free …
(WordPress.org – Themes Directory)
As WordPress becomes more popular, more designers are now starting to create themes for a wider audience of WordPress users.
Themes vary from corporate-looking, to designs that are beautiful and would easily cost thousands of dollars to create. Surprisingly, themes are fairly inexpensive.
You can see several WordPress theme galleries containing various examples of great themes in this article:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits Of Using WordPress Themes
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using WordPress themes over using traditional web template design:
Ready To Use In Minutes
WordPress themes are quite easy to install on your site. Simply upload a zip file that contains the plugin files to your Plugins folder via your dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the WordPress themes repository at WordPress.org) directly from within your WordPress admin’s “Theme” section.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a thriving community of professional theme developers who make thousands of fantastic WP Themes available to WP users. And many of these themes are 100% free to use!
- Themes give sites a consistent “look and feel” across all of your blog’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, layouts, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your digital content. This makes it possible to swap the “look and feel” of your web site or blog as often as you want without changing the content.
- Many WP themes provide additional built-in functionality and settings that allow you to easily customize the theme’s style, layout and design elements to create a unique look to suit your needs.
- Many WordPress themes are built using a framework that allows users to upgrade the theme to newer theme versions without losing its unique customizations (e.g. CSS styles)
- WordPress lets you search, upload and install WordPress Themes automatically inside the dashboard.
- Themes allow WordPress users to save hundreds of dollars on website development costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are typically very inexpensive.
About Responsive Theme Design
Many WP theme designers are now creating themes that incorporate “responsive” functionality.
A responsive theme allows websites to automatically reconfigure the layout to display smoothly across different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as different devices (e.g. PCs, iPads, mobile phones, etc.) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for different platforms. Users can navigate, read and display a site on a range of devices without having to resize anything, or requiring the website owner to install additional browser tools.
Note: When searching for WordPress themes, we strongly recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that your web site will display correctly across all devices, it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore should comply with the latest standards of web design coding.
We hope that this basic overview has helped you gain a clearer understanding about WP themes, what WordPress themes are, how WordPress themes can help your business save money, and how WP themes make it easy to customize a website.
In our next article on helping you understand features and functionality of WordPress, we show you where to search for the best WP themes for your website or blog.
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