Not to sound judgmental! But If you are reading this post, I believe you might already have a website which is beautifully made using Adobe Photoshop with popular extensions of PSD, JPG, PDF, AI or PNG file formats. And, you are now looking for some advanced solutions to make your website future-proof and mercantile that can leap successfully with the changing scenarios of the IT industry.
Being a smart entrepreneur, you might be looking for a robust yet economical solution to transform your websites effectively into a dynamic business platform. PSD to WordPress Conversion has emerged as a quintessential solution to accentuate your business dreams. The core team of web community has gifted WordPress, a highly intuitive and feature-rich web development platform to all programmers and non-programmers.
Hence, creating a website is no more a subject of rocket science. Although you need to have an innovative and experimental perspective to work with WordPress while creating a website. In technical terms, I would say that if you want to create a perfect customized WordPress website then you must have a sound knowledge of the fundamentals of PHP, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS programs and some designing skills. All in all, you need a developer who is a perfect blend of a perfect designer and programmer.
However, It must be noted that converting a PSD file into WordPress theme is not very difficult if done under proper guidance. You just need to follow the right steps and procedures.
In this tutorial, I will focus on the fundamentals of PSD to WordPress Conversion. And If you diligently follow these procedural steps then you are no faraway from giving a tough competition to your business rivals in terms of web presence.
Basics Of PSD to WordPress Conversion
What Does a PSD file Mean?
PSD refers to file format in which photoshop files are saved. PSD files are static files which can be customized to add dynamic functionalities into the website. Photoshop is the most popular and widely used graphic designing tool that materializes your dream design into reality.
The files which are created using Adobe Photoshop are mentioned with the file extension as .psd
Why Choose WordPress?
I won’t boast WordPress abilities with my words, instead I would like to show you some fascinating facts about this platform.
74,652,825 powered websites
14.7 billion pageviews per month
46 million downloads
34,000+ plugins
51 Translations
WordPress comprehends a user-friendly CMS that configures a multi-functional framework that enables web developers to build highly innovative and customized websites for both commercial and personal use.
Glimpses Into The PSD to WordPress Conversion
In this section, I would like to detail you about the steps and procedures involved in the transformation of static PSD files into dynamic WordPress themes. Follow each of these steps proficiently to avoid any outage/error.
Slice PSD files
Slicing is the first step of any markup conversion process. All image formats like PNG, JPEG, or PSD are first sliced off and further, they are disintegrated into various groups such as Footer, Header, Navigation bar, Sidebar, etc. These sliced files contain the miniature (sliced) components of the original image. You might be wondering why slicing is done??? This is because original image file is big and it will take more time to process and load which will obscure the direct coding of the image file.
Adobe PhotoShop is preferably used for the purpose of slicing!
Note: Dynamic features like header & footer, background color, design color, formats, etc. need no detailed slicing while you must check that components like buttons and embedded images have been fully sliced (as they cannot be developed into dynamic formats).
Create XHTML/CSS File Formats
Here starts the core part of the process i.e coding part of transforming PSD into a website. First of all, create a blank web page and assemble all the sliced images into the web page exactly like the way it was in the PSD file.
Create an HTML file and give it a conventional name index.htm(l). This file will contain all the images from the PSD files coded in HTML or XHTML codec. After completing the basic layout of the web page, the next step is to stylize the web page according to the PSD files. For this purpose, Cascading Style Sheet(CSS) is used to add various features like font style, font size, color, text shadows, scaling of images, borders, etc. Create another file folder for these CSS style rules and name it Style.css and add it with index.html files. This will add the styles present in style.css files into various elements of the HTML file.
Break index.html files into WordPress theme file
After converting the static PSD files into HTML format, now you have one HTML file and one CSS file. Now you need to break these index.html files according to WordPress theme structure. As it is quite difficult to upload HTML file directly into the WP themes, so it is advised to break them into multiple file structures namely: archive.php, Header.php, Footer.php, Index.php, single.php, page.php, Sidebar.php, category.php, search.php, 404.php, comments.php, and comments-popup.php.
Do not miss to create header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php, single.php, and index.php as these are the basic files to create a WordPress theme. You can just create these .php files in any text editor.
Note: You need to be well-versed with the programming PHP language in order to perform this step efficiently. Need not to worry, if you are not a professional programmer, there are thousand of tutorials available online to help to get familiar with the PHP language.
Add Tags and functions
The flexible and robust framework of WordPress allows easy integration of functions into the WordPress themes. There are number of inbuilt functions which can be tagged in accordance to their features and functionalities. Add functional tags to the broken HTML files on which you have worked in the previous step.
Once these theme files are ready, you must create a new folder and name it with the name of your new theme. You can save CSS files, JavaScript files, and image files in this folder.
Add Plugins to augment Functionality
From now, you are just few steps away to experience the impeccable magic of WordPress. Add functions to your newly developed website using functional plugins. There are nearly 17,000 WordPress Plugins available online. Install these plugins on the back-end to augment the functionality of the website with new and advanced features.
You can check the processing of this website now. This is the final step of the conversion where you should check the functioning of the website on the basis of its added functions and features.
Follow these steps to easily get your custom WordPress themes. Using this process, you can easily turn your PSD file in a functional WordPress theme. However, if you are not a technocrat and simply want to have your WordPress website built by someone who is skilled in this field. Then you can hire a professional developer or you can approach an adept web development company to turn your dreams into reality!
