When you plan to build an online store, doesn’t Magento come as the “top of the mind” platform for building it? Well, despite the thriving competition present in the e-commerce segment, Magento has stood out and, differentiated itself as the e-commerce platform. You will find that it is easy to build and, maintain an e-commerce site built on the Magento platform.

At the same time, if you are planning to grow you business and, thus building an e-commerce website, you might want to consider integrating your images and, other things built on the PSD platform into your Magento platform. This way you can consider growing your business successfully and significantly.

Why should one consider integrating PSD into Magento HTML theme? You can actually have an endless series of products on your website and, even plan on adding more if you do this. You can stay updated with the kind of website your competitor’s own and, can even gain inspiration from these sites. Additional plugins can be added easily when you use the PSD to Magento integration.

Integration of Benefits

What happens when you integrate PSD into Magento especially when building your e-commerce website? Here are a few benefits listed out for you!

• When you integrate PSD in your Magento website design, you help enhance your website. The design is done taking into account all the business requirements. Naturally if the brand image is constructed well on your website, it attracts your target audience in a better way.
• If you are looking at constructing a successful website, you need to be W3C compliant. That’s a known fact. A W3C compliance will help you in getting more visitors, converting clicks to traffic, getting rid of coding errors and, finally managing a cross browser compatibility for your website. This is possible to a great extent with PSD to Magento integration.
• If you have a clean code, then your website is given a clean chit by the search engine crawlers. In a website that’s developed by integrating PSD with Magento, developers actually hand code the website thus increasing the quality of codes.

Now, that you are aware of the benefits that this integration brings to your website, its time for you to understand how you can do it. These are not the steps but, a checklist which will help you keep abreast with the various things you might need for the integration.

The Checklist

Before, you move on to the checklist, there are few things about this integration that you should know. It’s not as scary as it seems. It is relatively easy. But, you need to have knowledge on the basics of both Magento and PSD before moving on with the integration.

• Theme Creation: Make sure you follow the incremental structure when developing Magento themes. Normally most of you tend to make a mistake of creating separate themes in separate folders. This should be avoided.
• No jQuery: Magento does not use jQuery in its default state. Of course, you can always associate it with your theme. Make sure you do so before the prototype and, make sure that you have the jQuery. No conflict added to your library.
• XML Layouts: You need to understand the layout perfectly to design the Magento website. So, make sure you have enough knowledge before you start out.
• Developmental Tools: Don’t fret! Just use the developmental tools to create your Magento website. Profiler is one of the most common tools available
• Standard Markup: Make sure the code you develop is somewhat similar to the original code. The standard HTML markup is what Magento generally uses.
• CSS that’s Smart: Don’t alter the source template. You can create themes that are CSS friendly as Magento supports CSS.

The Integration Process

There are some tips that if followed can effectively integrate PSD to your Magento site. Here are those tips that you need to keep in mind while integrating.

• Passionate Designs: Your design should be simple, elegant and, done while keeping in mind your target audience. Don’t use colors or graphics that don’t match your business reputation.
• Slice it Accurately: Slice the PSD file that you have created using the theme of your website. Navigation panel, footer, banner etc. should be sliced well and, saved as separate image files. Remember to zoom when slicing and ensuring the rulers guide perfectly
• PSD to HTML/XHTML before CSS: Sliced PSD files need to be converted to HTML or XHTML in order to ensure a web compatible format as PSD is most certainly not web compatible. Code your elements manually using semantic code.
• The Integration: Now that it is in a web compatible format, convert it to Magento CMS format. You’re done with integration.

Remember to test the integration before making it live. It’s as simple as coding a normal website. Just remember not to complicate it much.