- HTML, the basic programming language of the Web, works by grouping your content inside tags that browsers then interpret and display. There are tags for paragraphs, tags for headings, tags for links, and so on, but HTML was never really built with style in mind. For example, if you wanted all headings to look a certain way, you had to insert specific style rules for every heading on your site. In the early days of the Web, this resulted in web pages that were a mess of code and nearly impossible to edit. The need arose for a related language that would take care of all the style rules and let HTML just worry about the content. That's where CSS came in.
- CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheets, allows you to create "style sheets" that declare style rules for your pages. Would you like to make all links bold and change colors when you hover over them? Would you like to give the section of your pages labeled "sidebar" a brown background? CSS allows you to do that, and can be used on one page or as many pages as you want. Thus, the simplest website template is simply a file (with a .css extension) that contains style rules; each page then contains one line of code that tells browsers to use that particular style sheet when displaying the page. CSS successfully separated presentation from content.
- WYSIWYG stands for "What You See Is What You Get." WYSIWYG editors aim to allow anyone to create website templates without knowing any of the underlying code. Many of these programs exist, but they've traditionally been met with limited success for a handful of reasons: they're expensive, many of them are so complicated that you're better off just learning the underlying code instead, and the code they create automatically is usually way bigger than it needs to be. In fact, the entire WYSIWYG name is something of a misnomer, because everybody views the web a little bit differently depending on their screen size, browser, personal settings and so on.
- Content management systems, or CMSes, are programs that you install on your server that provide a simple user interface for controlling your site. For mid- to large-scale websites, CMSes--either publicly available or built specifically for you by hired company or freelancer--are a must. A typical CMS consists of an administration area that allows you to add a new article to your site, change what appears on your homepage, and upload or edit site templates. Many CMSes, such as WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal (all completely free), have active communities that create hundreds of templates built around that CMS's particular system. You can use one of the pre-built templates, tweak it to your own specifications or create your own. The genius of templates is that you can change them independently of your content--switching a template means that your site looks different, but the content, pages and links it contains all remain untouched.
- What a website template consists of depends on what tools you're using to create your website. Templates for blogs built on Blogger, for example, consist of only one file, most of it a style sheet. WordPress site templates consist of a number of files: an overall style sheet, plus a series of pages that provide rules for how different types of pages on your site exist. For example, you might want your search results page to have a different design than a page featuring an article.
