WordPress is known for its ease of use and versatility – it is one of the most accessible CMS in the world, its plugin marketplace makes it support an insane number of features, and its file management system and ecosystem, in general, make it really easy for you to customize the website. All of these features have propelled WordPress to the top – being the most popular CMS with the largest number of websites on the entirety of the Internet.
One of the weaknesses of WordPress, however, is that (at least for beginners) a distinctive look and feel that can be recognized even if you install different themes. That’s a lot of businesses and professional people supply their own designs in Photoshop and try to convert it to a proper website using WordPress. This is generally a great idea and ensures your website looks special and unique, but if you’re a beginner, you might make a few mistakes. This article will help you avoid them.
Don’t Use Vanilla WordPress
Vanilla WordPress while still being powerful and easy to use, it has a lot of limitation. When you’re developing a WordPress website to resemble your theme, you really don’t care about whether you’re doing it purely through WordPress or not, you want a great looking website with stable performance, good features, and responsiveness. And there are a lot of plugins and third-party libraries that can make your life easier. Libraries like Bootstrap are great to manage the CSS of the website and ensure you have a versatile good looking website with decent animation. There are plugins that will help you make the design more responsive, there are others that will help you integrate social media platforms better. Don’t limit yourself and try to do your research on, arguably, the strongest WordPress feature (plugins) before going through with the project.
Make Sure the Theme is Responsive
Photoshop designs aren’t responsive, and it is really easy to make sure every element of the design is pixel-perfect, but this isn’t possible in code – especially as your website will be visited from a lot of different devices with different screen sizes. You’ll be visited from 5-inch mobile phones with a 720p screen to a 32-inch 4K computer monitor. Making sure your website displays sharply and correctly on such a wide range of screens and devices is extremely important. One could argue that it takes precedent over how beautiful are the animations or how detailed are the 4K artworks. You have to have priorities, and the responsiveness of your theme and its compatibility with a large swathe of devices should be at the top of your list.
Don’t Be Afraid of Hiring an Agency
You shouldn’t be afraid of paying money and commissioning an actual agency to help you convert the PSD designs to an actual fully functional website. Remember, if you’re running a business or building a professional personal website, how stylish, responsive, and functional is the website will largely determine how will your clients and potential clients respond and how much revenue you can get from your online presence. That’s why you shouldn’t be afraid of spending a bit extra to get professional help and use a PSD to WordPress conversion service when developing your website. If you leave the commonly held myopic view and look at this through a long-term lense, it is highly likely that a professionally-made website will generate more money for your business in the long run.
