Thursday, July 21, 2011

How to Slice and Code a PSD file into Joomla Template?

Joomla is a widely used Content Management System (CMS) that enables webmasters to create dynamic and interactive portals. Most of the website owners prefer to use a CMS instead of creating hardcoded HTML websites. CMS makes it easy for the website owners to make changes as and when they want.
There are several Content Management Systems available out there; Joomla is one of the best and award winning CMS. Being open source a lot of developers prefer to work with Joomla. Its advanced features such as menu manager, in-built help section, user management, language manger, media manager tool and an extensive library of extensions make it the best CMS of the world.

When you develop a website from scratch, you need to get the design ready first – you can call it layout as well. It helps you understand how the end product will look like. Designing is the first phase of website development lifecycle. At the end of the designing phase you get the image file in PSD format.

The next step is to convert PSD to HTML or PSD to XHTML/CSS and integrated with the CMS you are going to use. Since you are going to use Joomla, you have to slice the PSD file and code it for Joomla templates.

PSD files are created in Adobe Photoshop. First, you have to slice the image by dividing the image in various layers in Photoshop. Then you have to convert the layers into HTML; you must know HTML/XHTML and CSS syntax for this. Only a skilled person who knows how to code in XHTML and CSS can accomplish this task. Any error at this level would spoil the website’s structure. HTML coding should be done by someone who is technically sound otherwise it may damage the functionality of the website.

The next step is to integrate the XHTML/CSS version with Joomla CMS, which is actually called PSD to Joomla conversion and your website will be ready to go live. To convert PSD to Joomla, developer must have a brief knowledge of using Joomla to convert the HTML/CSS into Joomla template.

You can create Joomla template directly from PSD file but that is a complex task; most developers create the XHTML/CSS version so that the task of developing Joomla website becomes easier and error free as well.

In a nutshell, there are three major steps involved in the whole process.

1] Slice the PSD file – divide it in many layers in Adobe Photoshop

2] Code it in HTML or XHTML/CSS keeping W3C standards and SEO factors in mind

3] Integrate the HTML or XHTML/CSS file with Joomla

You should always hire an expert Joomla developer to get your PSD, PNG files or HTML codes integrated with Joomla.

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