WordPress – The New Word for Web Design

The process of building websites has developed over the years from the early days of ‘hard coding’ (knowing how to write code from scratch in notepad), through a variety of editors and WYSIWYG programs. The wide use of css, dynamic languages and systems for website building brought greater functionality and arguably greater complication to the act of ‘getting a website’. The use of control panels and CMS and CRM systems began to allow more people to create technically advanced and good looking websites without having to learn about all of the separate parts and how they fit together. WordPress is a step forward again in this direction with a healthy dose of commercial reality and context built-in or possibly ‘plugged in’ i.e. the way WordPress can automatically incorporate a good degree of Search Engine Optimisation to a website – again without the need for a wide knowledge of the subject by the website builder.

What’s Different About WordPress?

• WordPress is a complete Content Management System that is:
• Free. Yes it’s free to download the latest version.
• Contributed to and constantly improved by developers worldwide because it is ‘open source’.
• Easy to customise, add greater functionality and ‘engagement’ features to, and easy to ‘search engine optimise’ through the use of many thousands of ‘plugins’ and widgets.
• Dynamically constructed using PHP and MySQL but can be turned into static html to improve download times and to make it easy for any search engine to negotiate and gather information about the pages (for categorising and ranking purposes).
• Fast – website development and editing times can be dramatically reduced compared to custom website development.

The Building Blocks – Creating a Great Looking WordPress Website

Classic ‘web design’ i.e. creating aesthetically pleasing pages with a consistent theme can be simplified in WordPress through the use of pre-prepared ‘Themes’ (the design ‘skin’) which are essentially made up of ‘Templates’.

WordPress has a directory of ‘Themes’ to choose from. Adding them or changing them in the WordPress website essentially changes the look of the site without making changes to the underlying software that makes the website work and link together. Adding or changing the entire look of your website therefore can be achieved at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time of custom designed pages. It also does not necessarily require traditional ‘design’ experience or knowledge e.g. the use of design programs such as Photoshop.

The design ‘Themes’ available from the WordPress Directory are tried and tested, there is large amount of free options, searches by style and type are easy and fast, and they can be viewed before you add them to your website.

Adding Themes

You can quickly download the zipped theme from the directory, extract it, and move it up online to an appropriate directory on the server where you are hosting the WordPress website. The theme can be applied to the website via several popular routes e.g control Panel / cPanel using the appropriate File Manager , and the Administration Panel. In short, it is quick, and relatively easy to create an entire and consistent, professional-looking, and up to date theme for your website.

Template Files - Behind the ‘Themes’

The building blocks of theses ‘Themes’ are the ‘Template Files’ which dynamically build a page out of several different parts. The ‘bones’ are an XHTML page and the presentation / how things are displayed in a browser is governed by CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The pages themselves that appear as one whole page on your monitor when viewed through a browser are made up of several parts that are each generated by a template file. Examples of these parts are the ‘Header’ (where the Meta information normally goes), the ‘Footer’ (where the links at the bottom of a page go), the ‘Content’ (where the main text and pics go), and perhaps other parts related to navigation such as a Side Bar. This piecing together of dynamic parts indicates the importance of turning the pages into ‘static’ html when the main website design is completed.

Putting Images in The WordPress Website

As you might imagine, adding images to a WordPress website can be done easily via a built-in uploading facility. You don’t have to use the traditional ‘FTP’ method, but you still can if your prefer. WordPress is also good at any of the traditionally time-consuming and fiddly image management jobs such as re-sizing or thumbnail creation. It’s also easy to incorporate your company images in your website design using e.g. template tags, the style sheets in your chosen ‘Theme’ and via the use of plugins.