Monday, December 12, 2011

How to Convert PSD template to WordPress Theme

Talk to any developer in the world and you will find that PSD to WordPress conversion is one of the most used techniques developing a website. A majority of website developed in the last few years have used the PSD to WordPress technique. This allows you to design a website as per your liking as an image in Photoshop and integrate it with WordPress which is the most popular content management system in the world. With PSD to WordPress theme conversion you can easily achieve websites which are visually attractive, easy to navigate and search engine friendly. To convert PSD to WordPress you need to follow a few basic steps.

Steps To Convert PSD Template into WordPress Theme
  • Slice With Perfection – In the first step of PSD to WordPress theme conversion you need to slice the PSD files. PSD files are not web compatible and thus they need to be sliced and converted into a web compatible markup. You should mentally break down your website into small section before you start slicing it. This will help you slice with precession, code it and later integrate into WordPress. While slicing it would be wise to separate the logo, banner, links panel, body, footer etc. Each sliced files should be pushed into a different layer and saved as an image.

  • Convert PSD to HTML/CSS – Once you have the sliced files you need to code it into HTML or the advanced markup XHTML. This is where you will define the functionalities of each element in the website and this serves as the most important step of PSD to HTML conversion. Make sure you use semantic coding techniques which enhance the performance of the website in the search engines. You also need to code the CSS or the Cascading Style Sheet which controls all the design attributes of your website and also helps it render fast on a web browser.

  • W3C Validation – To ensure that all the codes are in proper order and there are no errors in the code base you need to validate your HTML/XHTML code using the guidelines laid down by W3C. This will also validate the structure of your website and ensure it functions well on the search engines.

  • Integrate HTML/CCS into WordPress – In the last step the HTML and CSS needs to be integrated into WordPress to give the website its final form. PSD to CSS/WordPress theme integration can be easily achieved using the WordPress admin where the individual files are integrated inside the WordPress CMS. This ensures that website can be managed using the web based interface without touching the code.
PSD to WordPress theme conversion needs to be done with precession to achieve pixel perfect conversion. You need to make sure that you hire the services of developers who have sound knowledge of this development technique. They should hand code the website to ensure that the code is clean and attracts search engine crawlers. There are some development companies which specialize in this job and you can hire their services.

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