WordPress Themes Explained

This tutorial explains what WordPress themes are, what makes WordPress themes unique, and the benefits of using WordPress themes to improve the design of your website or blog.

Themes - An IntroductionThe development of web site publishing tools like WordPress has truly simplified web design and web development for anyone wanting a website.

This is a great thing for individuals or businesses planning to start a web presence that they can manage by themselves.

Prior to blogging and the development of powerful and effective content management systems, if you needed to get a site built for your business, you typically would have to wait until both the website development and web design processes were completely done. This process could take many weeks, even many months!

WordPress themes helped change all this. In this post, we will explore what WP themes are, how themes help you save money, and how themes let you easily customize your website.

Web Site Design Evolution

More website owners today will benefit from a change in website design that has been going for many years now. If you own a small business, you may want to know about this, because it can save your business thousands of dollars on website development and website design costs.

Let’s briefly go over what happened before WordPress came along:

First, you would discuss your project with a web site development agency or designer. Then, the “web design” had to be decided upon. This meant time and money being spent with someone with web site design skills discussing areas of the website such as the, colours, styles, page elements, content, etc.

Each page of your site then had to be individually created with all your elements and codes inserted into the page content. All 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, images, media elements, etc.

WordPress Themes - An Overview

(image source:adobe.com)

Only once everything passed testing and worked how it should (and looking how the 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 “web templates”. A web template allows design elements of the website to be worked on separately from the page content. Having ready-made templates helped to make building websites faster and resulted in reduced production costs. This also allowed web designers to service smaller business clients with less money to spend on marketing …

A Newbie's Guide To Understanding Themes

(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)

As more web development agencies began using “template-based” websites, web templates were designed that provided clients with different custom features and options, like colour palettes, the ability to specify different layouts and styles, etc …

As websites and web editing tools evolved, website templates also began transforming into web templating “systems” that let website owners control the design aspects of a web site.

Then, a “blogging” software called WordPress was developed and helped to start a new online publishing revolution …

A Basic Guide To Understanding Themes

(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 push the concept of a website template system much further.

A WP theme controls the design areas of your web site. It lets you add a “skin” to your site similarly to what a website template system does but it provides users with more control over the management and customization of template settings.

As WordPress explains in its web 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, one of the unique features of WordPress is that how your web site appears to visitors in no way affects the way your site is configured in the backend to handle areas like content management and functionality.

Basically, what this means is that a WP theme lets you modify the appearance 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 set up WP website for e-commerce, changing the entire look of your site with another theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of your web site. All e-commerce features, plugin settings and product information will remain unaffected, but the site will look completely different.

Why is this such a big deal?

Because when you use WordPress, you no longer need to spend weeks or months waiting for your web design to be done. You can get your website built simply and start with any theme you want, and then customize the entire look, feel and design of your WordPress site in a few minutes, whenever you decide … and as many times as you like!

Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your site without needing web coding knowledge. Simply choose a theme you want, install it on your site and activate it. WordPress lets you change your web design and customize elements like header images, layout, styling options and more in less than a few minutes …

Themes - An Introduction

As WordPress is distributed as open source software, web design companies anywhere in the world can create themes specifically for the WordPress CMS platform using the WP template system.

This means that loads of high quality WordPress themes are made available to WP users. WordPress are usually distributed freely under the terms of the GNU License Definition, or sold as Premium (i.e. paid) themes.

The WordPress development team maintains a FREE theme directory which gives WordPress users access thousands of great WP themes at $0 cost …

Themes - An Overview

(WordPress.org – WordPress Theme Directory)

As the popularity of WordPress increases, more designers are now focusing on developing themes for a wider audience of WordPress site owners.

WP themes range from corporate-looking, to jaw-dropping designs that are visually stunning and would typically cost hundreds to thousands of dollars to commission. Surprisingly, WP themes can be purchased fairly inexpensively, especially when you compare the cost to what it would have cost you if a web designer had to build it from scratch.

You can view a number of WP theme galleries that include various examples of great WP themes here:

Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!

(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)

Benefits & Advantages Of Using WordPress Themes

Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using WordPress themes over using traditional web design:

Ready To Start Using In Minutes

Themes are very easy to install on your site. Simply upload the plugin file to your Plugin folder via your dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the WordPress themes directory at WordPress.org) directly from within your WordPress dashboard.

Understanding Themes

Additionally …

  • WordPress has a growing online community of commercial web designers and design companies who, collectively, make thousands of great WordPress Themes available to WP users. And many of these themes are 100% 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, etc …
  • A “theme” works independently of your blog’s content. This makes it possible to swap themes as often as you need without disturbing the website’s underlying settings.
  • Many themes come with built-in functionality and settings that let you easily customize the site’s layout, style and design elements to create a unique look to suit your preferences.
  • Many WP themes are built using a framework that lets users upgrade the theme to newer theme versions without losing its unique customizations (e.g. styles)
  • WordPress lets you search, import, install and update WordPress Themes automatically directly from within the admin panel.
  • Themes helps you save hundreds, even thousands of dollars on web design costs. Free themes cost nothing and most “Premium”WordPress themes are normally very affordable.

Responsive WP Theme Design

Many theme designers are now developing “responsive” themes for the WP CMS.

A responsive theme enables websites to automatically reconfigure the layout to display smoothly across different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as across different platforms) …

Understanding WP Themes

A responsive theme is also optimized for each device type. Users can navigate, read and load your site on various device browsers without having to readjust their browser settings, or requiring the website owner to have installed additional display elements.

Note: When searching for WordPress themes, we strongly recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will a responsive theme ensure that the content and layout of your site will display correctly on all devices, but it also means that the theme is newer than most non-responsive themes and therefore should comply with the latest standards of website design and web coding.

We hope this post has given you a clearer overview of WordPress themes, what WP themes are, how WordPress themes help you save money on website development costs, and how WordPress themes make customizing websites easy.

In our next blog post in the article WordPress beginners on helping you understand features and functionality of WordPress, we show you where to find the best themes for your website.

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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum

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