WordPress allows you to create custom templates. These can only be used for pages (not for posts). A custom template allows you to display content differently or easily use built-in WordPress functions within a template.
Just to give you a good example of what custom page templates are and how they can benefit your site (no matter what theme you're using), let's create a custom version of the archives template. This is also what we will use to create a custom archives page that should be much more useful to our readers than the standard one. Here's what the archives look like on my blog right now:
There are just a couple of small links in the sidebar that redirect visitors to a standard monthly archive. ...
