WordPress Themes and Its Evolution

1. WordPress Themes and Its Evolution WordPress themes just like traditional website design and modern website design has undergone a lot of changes and have evolved a lot. While HTML went ahead from version 1 to version 5.0 WordPress themes definitely have covered a lot of space too and have evolved a lot from being a simple blogging utility way back in 2003 to being a self hosted CMS which can be used for basically any kind of website. Early WordPress themes: Earlier years WordPress themes were only used to design and develop news and simple blog websites. Whereby people used to simply blog about various topics and interests and WordPress was their preferred choice over other CMS for blogging purposes due to its integration with commenting and categorization and tagging features. Most users had 1 or 2 sidebars at the most in their blogs and it used to have different color and be in fixed width of 800-900px accordingly. Corporate WordPress themes: Nowadays WordPress themes are used for large websites with several levels of pages or corporate WordPress themes or websites for news magazine or varied kinds of uses. WordPress themes can now have unlimited sidebars and widgets in them. Font based icons: Nowadays WordPress themes can be integrated with a lot of icons and most of them are font based so that they can be used for fancy designs as well as pictoral and visual experience. More plugin based integrations: Not just WordPress themes but plugins also have evolved a lot and hence most WordPress themes nowadays depend on plugins for number of purposes with gallery set up to image carousel and sliders. To paying for something i.e. E-commerce to contact forms we have plugins for everything. SEO, Social media plugins as well. Hence WordPress themes nowadays focus on integrations and rules so that it goes well with any of these plugins and can be used with them to add as many features as is needed to develop a website. Page builders: We all know HTML can do several things and people may want accordions, tabs, fancy side menus and several other kinds of animated textual experience which isn't possible for anyone without coding knowledge. Hence WordPress themes in general nowadays integrate itself with variety of page builders which make this easy for non coding experience users to have the way they want their content to be set up easily and effectively. Security now top priority: Contrary to initial days where HTML didn't have much protection nowadays data protection of images, files, and hacking attempts are on rise. Hence it is worthwhile to consider Security. Even WordPress themes coded poorly with external javascripts can cause sites to get hacked easily. Hence it is desired to keep WordPress themes free from external javascripts and use the ones which are recommended plus keep coding tight so that hack attempts can be avoided easily. Multi Lingual: Since globalization there has been a rise in multiple language WordPress themes whose demand have risen with the fact that companies also want to target not just locals but people from all countries. Hence WordPress themes also need to address this issue so that they are multilingual and people can build websites with multiple languages easily. Compatibility with browsers: WordPress themes need to be compatible with several browsers like Internet Explorer, or Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Edge which is latest. There are mobile browsers as well which a WordPress theme needs to be compatible to. Mobile responsive: With rise in use of smartphones many users prefer to check a website directly using their smartphone and hence Google mobile friendly and mobile responsive WordPress themes are more and more in demand because everyone wants mobile customers and don't want them to give an ugly website which they can't access via mobile phone. Thus we can see the purpose and the usage of WordPress themes has not only evolved but the features also have increased a lot.