Difference between template, theme, framework and page builder

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This is undoubtedly one of the articles that I most wanted to develop for the community.

In my opinion there is a lot misinformation and too much marketing on a subject as basic and at the same time as important as the technology that you are going to apply to your WordPress website, not in terms of plugins (which also) but to the general functionality of your website through a template, theme , framework or page builder.

If you are just starting out with this, as well as if you already have some knowledge, you have spent many hours in front of your web project, and still, you feel that “something is missing”, in this article you can discover the difference between template, theme, framework and

In the second point of this article I will detail my particular professional situation and the tools that I need in each case as WordPress “implementers”, so that you have a more direct and concrete idea of which tool to use in each situation.

Keep reading and discover which tool is the most suitable for your project or that of your clients!

What is your situation?

Like any good consultant on any theme (not just WordPress), there is a word that should be sold on t-shirts, hats, coffee mugs, etc… and this word is pure gold for anyone who wants to give a super-professional answer to any question: depends.

I know, pica a bit, and it is very general, but the fact is that the use of one tool or another for your web project, It will depend on the objective and situation in which you find yourself..

Below I describe some situations among which you may find yourself. (For each of the situations I propose a type of tool that I describe in this article, and that I will develop a little further below).

Four examples of professional situations

Situation 1: Professional who needs a theme quality

I am a professional in my sector, but I am not dedicated to making websites. As I am starting, I want to create a simple website that explains what I do and how to contact me. I need something quick and pretty, without spending a lot of money on it.

situation 2: Event that needs a very cool template for yesterday”.

You are the marketing coordinator of a medium-sized company, and your boss has commissioned you to create a website for this very week, for a “cocktail” with your city council. The website will have an “agenda”, a couple of photos, a Google map of the event, and a phone number for people to call if they are interested.

Situation 3: Intranet for a company of 600 workers with a good Framework for WordPress.

You are the developer of a rather large company. Your boss has asked you to create an Intranet with different functionalities in less than 2 months, where workers can interact with each other, write articles, and upload photos and events. All without the need for technical knowledge. You know how to program perfectly, any language, but you decide to use WordPress and a good Framework, so you don’t have to “start from scratch” the whole project.

Situation 4; Page Builder as a landing page creation machine.

You are a WordPress implementer. You know the tool like the back of your hand. You decide to use a premium page builder, to create several of your own templates for different themes, and to be able to implement them at low cost, in a matter of hours, for many clients in niche markets.

As you can see, depending on your situation, you will need one type of tool or another.

Also, depending on your situation, you will need a “mix” of these tools, depending on the need of your project or that of your clients.

If it helps to make it clearer, the tools we are talking about in this article can be ordered from “least complex” to most complex:

Template
theme
Page Builder
Framework

my professional situation

I want to talk here a bit about my professional situation in relation to the tools I use for certain clients, since, on the one hand, you may be a freelance like me, and have clients, or on the other hand, you may be in the Same situation as one of those customers.

When you are faced with a WordPress project, whatever the type, you must first make a estimation of “size” of the project, being these:

simple websites

But really simple, not “simple” as many people tell me when sending them a quote (wink wink).

This type includes the websites that are not going to require any type of Custom Post Type (that is, if they only need the ones that come by default with WordPress), and those that are satisfied with the appearance and structure that is given by the template itself. .

Examples of these websites would be: a simple event website, a “one page” website for a hairdresser, physiotherapist, etc.

intermediate websites

The vast majority of my clients fall into this group. They are websites for a slightly larger business, a restaurant, a hotel, a real estate agency, etc.

Normally these websites yes they require Custom Post Types (houses, plates of food, rooms, etc) and this is where a very important factor of the plugins comes in, which should not have the themes. (I explain it below).

I always do these types of websites with a good Page Builder, a very simple and fast-loading template, and very specific plugins.

Big Webs

I have also done some of these, and this group includes Intranets, websites that are pure “applications” of some kind and that are scaling, social networks, forums, CRMs, project managers… as you can see, everything is possible in WordPress.

For these websites, the most important thing for me is to have a minimum quality base, in terms of template and Page Builder, and gradually completing it with plugins.

These types of websites can also be built on Frameworks, although I rarely use them (because of the type of client I have, and because my knowledge is not so technical at the code level).

However, there are very professional developers who, if you give them a good Framework, will set up whatever you want. (The difficult part is getting the end customer to know how to use it later).

Now I am going to talk to you about each of these tools separately, and you will immediately see that not all of them are to my taste, and that I have a favorite.

Templates and Themes

We start with the templates and themes, which although they are not the same, are very similar (hence why I put them together in this section).

The biggest difference between the two is that the template is ideally correct, and the theme is theoretically wrong (according to my way of seeing).

I explain.

A template ideally correctis one that simply comes with an “empty” design, without fireworks, very functional and with a good code as a base, where you build everything to your liking.

This template will also come with a “child-theme” (child template) which is even simpler, and in which you must apply changes (if you need them), and never in the “parent” template.

The basic reason for this is that if you do it directly in the parent template, when an update comes to it, your changes will be lost (as they will be replaced by the original files each time it is updated).

However, everything you write in the child template (for example in style.css or in functions.php), will be always intact on every update.

There are templates that come with some more advanced options, in a well-managed control panel (for example the one I use: Pro). But never without leaving the concept of an “aesthetic” template for your website.

The rest of the functionalities that you need for your website, use the template that you use, They must come from the hand of independent plugins

And now it’s time to talk about the themes….

Themeforest and other theme markets

This section is where I will tell you about the big difference, or at least how I see it, between themes and templates.

The themes They have evolved a lot (but for the worse).

In 2009, when I started with WordPress, there were themes that were the same as templates in terms of functionality, and the only difference was that “theme” means “template” in English.

But for about 5 years, the themes have been “evolving” a lot, and becoming true marketing monsters within WordPress, to sell like hotcakes, without counting on their quality.

frameworks

We now move on to talk about the all-powerful Frameworks (and I save the Page Builder for last).

Without going into much detail or definition of “dictionary”, the most important thing to differentiate them is that Some technical knowledge is required to get the most out of the investment that a good Framework supposes (they are somewhat more expensive than the rest, because they bring a very advanced technology).

That is, a Framework is a technical tool which makes it easier for developers to build true web applications with WordPress to a certain extent, since if they did it from “scratch”, they would always have the most common problem for any developer: headaches because they don’t know why the written code “fails”.

In addition, every good Framework comes with good support behind it, and this is pure honey for a developer at any level: that they solve any doubts they may have and avoid headaches and sleepless nights.

A Framework comes as a zip file, which you install on your…