If you’re at the stage of site development were you’re still considering your options, you’re likely finding out that there are probably a lot more options than you ever thought available on the market. The most popular option for websites these days is actually WordPress. WordPress can function as a simple blogging platform or as a powerful content management system. Beyond the suitability of WordPress, you’ll run into questions about utilizing themes. Some technical aspects to WordPress templates that make it quite advantageous.
Code Compliance
There are many changes going on with code these days, some of them due to the fact that mobile devices have become so popular. If you’ve noticed, some mobile devices do not display certain technologies correctly – Flash being a good example of this – and other technologies are simply not particularly usable in mobile devices.
Professionally designed WordPress themes generally come with the assurance that the code underpinning them is produced up to World Wide Web Consortium standards. This allows the site owner to skip a lot of design costs that go into testing, debugging and rewriting code to make certain that it is compliant with not only W3C standards, but with all of the many mobile devices available on the market.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization has some overarching and rather broad concepts, such as using keywords and meta-tags, but there are some very important aspects that have to do with technical elements of a website. Among the most significant of these aspects are site maps, link structure and so forth.
Most commercial themes for the WordPress platform will come with accommodations to satisfy all of the various search engine optimization requirements that fall under the category of technical tasks. This is an ideal situation for people who want to maintain and administer their own website, and something that has contributed to the impressive popularity of WordPress across the world.
Nothing New
Among the persuasive points generally used to support the idea of having a website designed from scratch or designing one’s own WordPress theme is that of originality. When it comes down to it, however, just about every conceivable web design has already been used on one site or another. More important in today’s world than originality is consistency.
There are conventions to good design. For example, good design is generally as aesthetically pleasing as it is functional. Coming up with designs from scratch can be an extremely difficult and expensive process and, if you’re not working with a designer with whom your ideas are compatible, you may find that you never get exactly where you want to go with the design of your site.
WordPress themes produced by commercial designers generally have the advantage of allowing you to easily change elements of the theme that drastically alter the overall appearance of the site, but that do not require an overhaul at the programming level. The designs tend to adhere to rather establish conventions – the designers are trying to sell the themes, after all – but there unique enough among their number that the end result isn’t something that looks like it was ripped off from another website.
While you will still have access to all of the administrative functionalities built into the WordPress platform, commercial themes often times come with the advantage of including additional functionalities that are added in an administrator panel, making administering the site a lot easier.
Utilizing WordPress to its fullest advantage sometimes means having a theme that is customized to your needs. While commercial designers may sell the same themes repeatedly, customization features and functionality are generally sufficient enough to allow you to create an original and highly useful website.
