An Amazing Guide to Convert PSD to WordPress Theme

Business organizations looking to make a global impact have to have their professional website. Companies are shelling off, quite handsome amounts for developing interactive, dynamic, and attractive websites. For professional website creation and development, you will need developers and designers with specific skill sets. In such an aspect, PSD to WordPress theme conversion acts as an effective approach. Before learning about the conversion, it is important to understand what is PSD and WordPress and how this conversion will be beneficial. 

What is PSD?

Photoshop Design is abbreviated as PSD. Adobe Photoshop is used for creating amazing designs and this software is one of the favorites with website designers and developers. It is with the help of this software that some of the best WordPress website designs have been created. Once the designer completes a design, it is saved as a PSD file. This design is handed over to WordPress developers for turning it into a theme. 

What is WordPress?

WordPress is probably the most popular CMS which is being used by developers for developing a website. As per recently obtained statistics, it has been found that more than 70% of websites run on the WordPress platform. Various other CMSs like Joomla, Drupal, etc. have been left way behind in the competition. With innumerable features and user-friendly attributes, WordPress is the coveted choice of almost all website developers. 

Conversion of PSD to WordPress

For web development projects, the conversion of PSD to WordPress is a great idea. However, this transformation takes little time and is a bit tricky too. You can follow a PSD to WordPress tutorial and do the work on your own. However, if you are hard-pressed for time, you can hire a PSD to WordPress company and avail of its services. 

Mentioned below are 6 steps with which you can carry out the work of conversion of PSD files to WordPress themes:

Analyzing and Understanding the PSD

The first and most important step of conversion of PSD file to WordPress is analyzing the PSD file with immaculate precision. With this analysis, you will be able to comprehend the complications that might come up during the conversion process of PSD to WordPress. During the conversion process, there are various activities like putting header, footer, title, and images; splitting mockup into HTML and CSS codes. Web developers should have an absolutely clear concept during converting the files. With the analysis, you have a perfect initialization before the actual conversion process commencement. 

Slicing the PSD

There are some image formats like JPEG or JPG, which are not layered. However, a PSD file can be layered and sliced. Web developers know the tricks of slicing the PSDs. The PSD design is cut into small layers using Photoshop. Now each individual slice gets linked to various URLs, which are again used for site navigation or in-page navigation. Once done, the whole thing is optimized in Photoshop. The PSD files, which are sliced, get saved in any format, including bitmap, JPEG, GIF, PNG, etc. 

Writing Different Codes

CSS, HTML, and JavaScript–Whether you hire a company for PSD to WordPress service Providers or do the conversion work on your own – you have to write different codes in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. 

Once the sliced PSD files are saved, developers can commence the work of creating an HTML website. The website should look identical to the PSD. It is here that you have to create different files for CSS, HTML, and PHP codes with extensions style.css, index.html, and index.php respectively. Each of these elements has different functions. Visual presentation of HTML elements is controlled by the CSS file. It is important that this script is written, thoroughly, tested, and further improved for great visual design and effects. It also plays a crucial role in responsiveness and cross-browser compatibility. The purpose of writing JavaScript is to make the interface highly interactive and rich. 

Integrating WordPress

Once the entire coding part of the conversion of PSD to WordPress is done, the next phase starts. In this phase, you have to integrate CSS/HTML with WordPress. For making a WordPress theme, you will need two important files – style.css and index.php. What you need to do is break up index.html files into .php files. Experts opine that if this process of integration is done immaculately with precision, the output is just as you want. You will have impeccable and brilliantly designed WordPress templates. The design and layout of the templates will vary from one another. You can choose the ones which will fulfill your website creation requirements. 

Addition of WordPress Tags

At this particular stage of conversion, all the markup elements have been broken down already into a WordPress PHP structure. It is the time when you can add extra functionalities and features. WordPress tags are one such functionality that helps in providing a completely functional WordPress theme. The end-user will have better control over plugin and widget additions, theme appearance settings, etc. Basically, the website gets better with all these additions and functionalities. 

Final Testing

When it comes to the web development process, testing is an integral and very important part. The WordPress theme which is created is unit tested in this step. It might happen that there are errors in PHP, JavaScript, and WordPress – these errors are fixed. Moreover, there is a validation of CSS and HTML on W3C standards. There is further testing of the theme for browser compatibility, performance, and responsiveness. Some modifications might be needed in CSS and JavaScript too so that the WordPress theme runs just perfectly. 

With the WordPress theme ready, you can now concentrate on the functionality part. Start adding new posts, pages, images, and fresh content on the website to make it attractive and customer-friendly. 

It is understood from the above post that the process of converting PSD files to WordPress is not that simple. Professionals offering a PSD to WordPress conversion services opine likewise. The work cannot be accomplished without having strong and thorough technical skills. There are many web development companies offering such services to customers. Look for the best company in this field and entrust them with the responsibility.