How To Get a Successful Ecommerce Store with PSD to Magento Conversion?

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

The mantra of today’s business is to sell products and services online. It opens a window of opportunity for your business over a large target audience and also allows you to keep a lion’s share of the profit without having to pay any middleman. Now to build a good ecommerce store you need to be backed by a robust technology and this is where PSD to Magento conversion comes into play. Magento is an open source ecommerce platform that adds punch to your website. Here is a step by step guide for building an online store using PSD to Magento conversion.

  • Design an Appealing Website theme : Your website design needs to look distinctive and what is better than using the most powerful design tool Photoshop. Here you design your website as an image which gives you immense creative freedom in terms of structure, color scheme and graphics used. Make sure you theme your website around your business as this gives you easy brand recognition in the market.

  •  Slice PSD File : Photoshop or PSD files aren’t web compatible and thus you have to convert them into any markup language. PSD to XHTML/HTML process starts with slicing the PSD files to separate the different sections of the website such as the body, menu, footer, logo etc. During the slicing process send each of these slices into different layers and save them as image files. This is done to define their functionality as each of these have a distinctive role to play in your store.

  • Markup Coding : This is the most vital step in the conversion process and here you convert PSD to HTML/XHTML. Make sure this coding is done by hand as this helps you achieve clean codes which enhance the performance of your website. Auto generated codes often have bugs and also tend to make your webpages heavy with unnecessary lines of codes. The coding should be done using semantic coding technique where each and every element is defines making it easy for the search engine crawlers to index them.

  • PSD to CSS : Your website needs to be uniform and this is done using a CSS or a Cascading Style Sheet which defines and standardizes the visual attributes such as color scheme, fonts, image sizes throughout your website. It basically separates the content from the design element allowing you to post content with ease without altering the structure of the website. The CSS files also reduce the page load time of the website adding to your advantage.

  • Validation : Once you are done with the coding it is important to validate it to ensure there are no errors which affect the performance of your website. This is done using W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) validation which not only checks for errors in your code but also makes sure that the website follows all the protocols of the web. This helps in achieving robust websites which are cross-browser compatible.

  • Magento Integration : This is the final step in the PSD to Magento development process. Here the HTML and CSS files are integrated into the Magento Ecommerce software. This basically bridges the Magento admin in the backend and the HTML/CSS in the front allowing you to control all the visual and functional elements of the website from the web based admin.  Directories and sub directories are created in this process defining the part of the files and folders. You can also install third-party plugins to increase the functionality of your website in this step.

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