So, you’re thinking of creating your website with WordPress? Congrats, your half work is done. How? Thanks to PSD to WordPress Theme Conversion process. All you need now is a WordPress theme. In short, an eye-catching website designed and developed. A responsive and elegant WordPress theme can make your website not just attractive also user friendly.
Thankfully, designing a temping or responsive website in WordPress is no rocket science. You can get the things done with just a bit of coding knowledge. Being a designer, you could be putting all your efforts and hard work into designing an amazing web design.
But, still need the proper programming skills to make your custom design more adorable and able to work on the web. All you need to do now is to convert your custom design to beautiful web design?
This article will guide you through five simple steps on how you can convert your PSD design into a responsive WordPress website.
What is PSD?
PSD is the Photoshop Document format created in Adobe Photoshop. It’s an editable file that lets you edit and save parts of your design template/image into a separate jpeg or png format files. This is the file where you can test all your creative skills to create your custom designs. You can open/edit a PSD file in Adobe Photoshop and start editing operations anytime, anywhere you want.
What Are WordPress Themes?
If you’re new to WordPress themes or templates, let us explain it to you in the simplest form. Consider WordPress themes just like your mobile themes. A mobile theme decides the look and feels of your phone – the icons and the wallpaper, the navigation, and the likes; a WordPress theme provides the basic visuals to your website.
A WordPress theme is a group of files, technically known as templates, which decide the design of your website. Back in time, WordPress started out as an open-source blogging platform and today become one of the most popular websites builders that non-programmers and individuals are so thankful for.
WordPress allows you to create your own blog or website without any complexities of web programming. In short, you don’t have to be an expert in programming to create a website on WordPress. WordPress allows you to add more functionalities to your sound with hundreds of pre-made plugins that you can use.
Read Also: Sketch to PSD Conversion: How to Convert it? [Updated 2020]
Converting PSD to WordPress themes
WordPress offers you a wide range of pre-built themes that you can use on your website. But, what if you want to create your own custom design? You need to transfer your custom design from a picture to a website. And, that’s what PSD to WordPress is. It may sound complex but it’s quite easy if you follow our following super-simple 5 steps.
Step #1: Slicing your PSD
It’s the starting of the process of converting your PSD into a WordPress theme. You slice your PSD design and divide it into separate image files (jpeg or png) so that each design component of your custom design is saved as a separate design file.
You can use any photo editing software online/offline or more preferably use Adobe Photoshop to slice your PSD files.
Make a mental note of what are all the things that you will need to load as an image on your web page. More web images mean slower web page. So try to optimize the images.
Now decide what needs to be static and what shouldn’t. One of the easiest ways to slice your PSD file is to look for these components first.
Background, header, separator, Footer, and others. And make sure while you’re slicing your components. Even a single mismatch of pixels can ruin your design.
Step 2: Create index.html and Style.css
Now the next step is to reach the programming world from the designing world. But it’s really simple. From your PSD design, create a static HTML and CSS template.
Pro Tip: It’s better to name these files index.html and Style.css for future use.
There are several software packages like Fireworks and Dreamweaver which can help you in this step. But learning a little bit of HTML and CSS language isn’t going to be a time waste. So follow some basic tutorials online like on Youtube or you can take help from sites like TutsPlus, W3Schools, and other online developer communities.
Now place your images rightly and sliced up the components into their correct positions with the help of index.html file and the corresponding CSS file.
Step 3: Structure your index.html file according to the WordPress theme files structure.
Now you got your basic WordPress template ready and you now you just need to port it to the WordPress. But before you do that you need to have a little bit of knowledge of how things are organized in WordPress. WordPress itself has a very specific file structure system that you have to follow.
Now, you’re basically going to upload your custom design web page to WordPress themes and WordPress will start working on it seamlessly so that the plugins and additional functionalities can be added without any problem.
All you gotta do now is to go to the WordPress standard file structure system and break your index.html file accordingly into the necessary .php files.
Two major files that create the whole WordPress theme are the index.php and the style.css files. Besides these, a WordPress theme is made up of various PHP files for the basic features like sidebar.php, header.php, footer. and the list goes on.
Don’t worry if you find this task a little hard to do. There are tons of free tutorials available online on platforms such as Youtube which will help you out with this.
Here are the basic files of WordPress:
- Themeindex.php
- Header.php
- Sidebar.php
- Footer.php.
Step 4: Add WordPress tags
You‘re almost done with your PSD to WordPress Conversion. All you gotta do now is to import the functionalities of WordPress into your custom theme files by using WordPress tags. Once you add these tags, you can say, you have created a WordPress theme on your own – without any professional help.
Check out this link to know more about the available WordPress template tags
On that link, you’ll get the details about every tag and you know how to use the best of them in your .php files. In case, if you want more functionalities in your site, you can check this link. It lists all the functionalities provided by WordPress.
Every functionality and tag under these two pages is explained in-depth with sample usages. It should be pretty easy for you to catch up with these functionalities and create your own themes whenever and wherever you want.
Once you’re done with the necessary functions and tags, you have to place all the files into a single folder that goes by the name you choose.
Once created, it’ll be placed inside the —-/wp-content/themes/ folder that could be easily found in your WordPress installation.
If you‘ve done everything right, you can activate your theme from the WordPress dashboard. There you go. Go check out your new WordPress website which is totally unique and custom-designed by you.
Step #5: Add functionalities
In this last step, you have successfully created your custom WordPress theme from your own design PSD file. But, here’s the thing – there’s always room for improvement. And the best part is, you should always keep improving.
So add more functionalities to your theme to make it more responsive and user-friendly. Learn the magic of working with WordPress themes.
If you got time, try learning more exciting techs like HTML, CSS, JavaScript to add even more exciting features to your theme. With the help of those languages, you can even create a custom design website from scratch by coding or become an expert in WordPress Customization.
The process of PSD to WordPress theme conversion isn’t that hard, instead, it’s quite easy. However, if this conversion process seems too much time-consuming and mind-boggling, you can choose our professional PSD to WordPress conversion service.
We have a professional team of WordPress web developers who have years of experience in PSD to WordPress Conversion, WordPress Customization, Sketch to PSD conversion, WooCommerce Customization, and much more. Got more in mind? Feel free to ask us anything here.
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