Building a website from scratch is no easy task. You have to sketch, wireframe, design and code the site. A job like this takes more than one person and a lot of time. But there’s a way you can do it as a lone designer in a fraction of the time.
WordPress themes are a designer’s best friend because they allow you to build a site from an already developed framework. This minimizes coding so you can focus more of your time on marketing, content, and design.
Customizing Vs. Hand Coding
Sometimes a hand coded website works better than a wordpress theme. If you’re building a site that has complex back-end functionality, you might not find a theme for that. But if all your site needs to do is display content to users, there are plenty of themes that can save you time and money.
The challenge is finding a wordpress theme with the content layout you’re looking for. Once you find that, the rest of the work is customizing the navigation, graphics, and adding your content. Here are a couple of situations where themes can benefit designers.
Themes for Client Websites
Many clients request designers to design a site for their business. Hand coding it and designing it from scratch could take months. Not only that, but any future updates or changes to the client’s site would go through you again. Hand coded sites are full of code that makes it hard for the client to do it on their own.
All wordpress themes come with a content management system that allow clients to log in, add or change content at will. It’s so easy to use you no longer have to hold your client’s hand to make changes to their site.
There are thousands of plugins that allow you to add widgets to your site so that you can extend your functionality without messing around with code. Clients can even install the plugins themselves right from the content management system.
Themes for Design Portfolios
Every designer needs a design portfolio to showcase their work. You could spend a lot of time and energy building a web portfolio from scratch, or you could customize a wordpress theme. There are many themes made for design portfolios.
These themes have a specific portfolio structure and layout that makes your site look and feel professional. Many of them also have their own image sliding and enlarging features that allow you to showcase your design work in beautiful detail. They also include page templates that allow you to add your own blog, biography and contact form.
Best Bang for Your Buck Themes
If you do your research, you’ll find many wordpress themes floating around the web. But not all of them give you the best bang for your buck. Many are overpriced, have poor graphics and unstable code. Elegant Themes is a themes site that’s head and shoulders above the competition. Their themes are coded to perfection, beautifully designed and give you a better bang for your buck than other theme sites.
The pricing and theme selection aren’t the only great things about Elegant Themes. Each of their themes include a theme options panel that allow you to easily customize and control the graphics of a website without ever touching a line of code.
You can toggle on and off features, change your layout, manage colors, optimize for search engines and more. Each theme also comes with shortcodes that allow you to easily insert different interface elements on your pages without having to code them in.
Join and Build Your Theme
Finding your perfect theme is the first step to building a great site for a client or yourself. Not having to build from scratch and mess with code lets you focus on the user experience.
Give your clients a site with a built-in content management system and plugin features that’ll make managing it so much easier. Build a design portfolio that uses rich image display widgets to showcase your work in the best light.
Most designers know how to work hard. But few know how to save time and work smart. Take advantage of customizable wordpress themes and build the site of your dreams.
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Its always a challenge for a designer to buy a similar theme and customize it for the customer. Though before selecting the theme the designer should do all the design ground work so that he can customize it and get the design as he thought of.
It does save lots of time to modify an existing theme to the client’s needs. What a designer does with the theme makes all greatest difference in the world. Some might say it’s cheating, to modify a theme, but modifying it correctly and still having great results can sometimes take longer than writing from scratch.
In the end, it’s the user experience that matters, both for the customer and end user.
Is this an advertorial for Elegant Themes? Really?
FYI I purchased an Elegant Theme because a client liked it’s look but had so many problems with getting it to work it we threw it out and started from scratch.
Which leads me to this; if a site can get away with nothing more than logo and color changes then commercial themes are great. But if a site needs a custom design it’s by far better to start from scratch and copy the PHP logic from WordPress’ Twenty Thirteen theme.
When it comes to design, Elegant themes is a great choice.