If you’re new to the world of web sites (or even if you’re not!), you might be wondering what a WordPress theme actually is and how it manages to transform the look of your blog or website with just a single click.  And, frankly, you have a right to wonder.  If you’ve ever played around with website publishing, you might have run across other systems that are not nearly as easy to redesign as WordPress.  And if you’ve ever just put up simple html files (possibly with scrolling marquees and animated GIFs back in the 1990s?), you probably remember what a pain it was to update even something as simple as the width of your website.  It required changing multiple numbers on every html file on your site.  Thankfully, the web has advanced quite a bit since those days and WordPress is designed from the ground up to allow you to take advantage of the best of today’s web publishing standards.

One thing you may have read at some point is that WordPress is a Content Management System, or CMS.  There are dozens upon dozens of CMSes out there other than WordPress — Joomla, Drupal, Typo3, PHP Nuke and many more.  Some are free and open source, some require a paid license.  However, free or paid, WordPress is BY FAR the most popular CMS-like publishing system for the web today.

So what does this have to do with what a theme is?  It’s simple:  WordPress is a Content Management System.  By definition, a CMS manages your content, not your design.  WordPress and other good CMSes make it easy to update your pages, add functionality to your site (via things like WordPress Plugins), write blog posts, publish your content to RSS feeds, add authors to your site and do many other things.  However, WordPress does not make it easy to design your website from within the WordPress interface itself.  A “default” WordPress installation comes with a default theme or two with some very simple options (keep in mind that I’m referring to the downloadable software being distributed at WordPress.org, not the hosted version of WordPress at wordpress.com).  If you want to change the look of your site, you either need to be skilled at graphic design, html, css and more — or you need a theme.

A theme itself is a series of files that tell WordPress to take your content and display it a certain way.  Remember that WordPress has all of your content — posts, pages, images and more — sitting in your website database.  WordPress doesn’t know what that content should look like.  The WordPress software needs a theme so it can know what your website should look like.  The nice thing about keeping the content and the design aspects separated is that you don’t need to touch your posts, pages or anything else to change your theme (in most cases — there are a few exceptions to every rule).  All you need to do in most instances is just upload a new theme zip file and then click activate.  If you’re using a premium WordPress theme (like those found here on FreeWP!), just refresh your homepage and you should be good to go.

Now you know what a WordPress Theme is!