The author tells…

It’s the first time you can create a WordPress theme from Photoshop in just a few minutes.

Broken layout and websites creation.

As usual, let’s start from the very beginning.

8 years ago I began marking up with the help of tables (yeah, I did!) and later I mastered layer mark-up. Since that time, I think, sites creation process hasn’t undergone any considerable changes:

You make a template in Photoshop (or any other graphics editor).
Slice graphics manually (in Photoshop etc.), then code your template in CSS /HTML editor with the help of layers or simultaneously – this takes about 1-8 hours per page.
To get a CMS theme, you devide a ready HTML code into parts and place them to necessary PHP files, and then you upload images and PHP files to your folders via FTP (which takes about 1-2 hours).
Remove possible bugs: cross browser ability, upload speed optimization, mismatches between dynamic CMS elements etc. (This sometimes takes up to 16 hours per page).

Most of all I was depressed with points 2 and 4, notably – questions to designer’s tools:

can an ordinary guy make a valid website by simply drawing its design (i.e. excluding points 2 and 4 from the process)?
why should I code and debug HTML, CSS and PHP code of the template or suffer from careless coders’ and programmers’ job?

Well, I found no single answer to those questions from the toolsets of the past years.

Now in brief about the toolset

Yeah, there are lots of qualitative tools on the market, but not all of them could answer the following question: What single tool do you use to stick your design to CMS? And when I saw the whole picture of the industry I realized the situation had to be changed as quickly as possible. At the end of April, 2008 I made up a couple dozens of pages for another Web 2.0 service with the priority of a high-quality markup. As the customer made corrections all along the process, it took me pretty long to debug the code. When the project was successfully completed, I realized there was a sharp necessity to make a tool able to perform all tasks I’ve mentioned above. Inspired with this idea, having a team and resources, we started developing the tool I’ve been dreaming of.

About a year has passed, and now we are ready to present you a product that is already good at some stuff: please watch the video and find answers to the questions we’ve stated from the very start here www.divine-project.com/tutorials

Divine was developed for those who know a bit from Photoshop and sites creation but don’t want to get bored marking up a valid site on the basis of CMS manually. By the way, the site gets uploaded to the server via the built-in FTP-client.

Until the official release we decided to make a techdemo and a free version with the limited number of functions but with the full execution of the functions presented. A free version with the ability to convert to WordPress is considered in this article.

“Well, how does it work?”:

To make it short and specific, here are two links:

Download the program and create your sites as quickly as possible. Absolutely free.
You can watch the process of site creation here: www.divine-project.com/tutorials

In the next article I’ll do my best to clarify the details of sites creation on the basis of the existing versions.

Wishes and comments

Specially for our project we made a service of votes and suggestions – www.ideastrunk.com. None of the existing services on the SaaS market satisfied us, and we decided to create our own product. It’s also totally free. You can leave your feedbacks, wishes or simply support comments left before. Ideas of product improvement are truly welcome before its official appearance on the market.

What functions are to be added first of all?
Any specific requirements?

Thanks for your time.

Links

Program’s official site: www.divine-project.com Got something to suggest to our developers? – use our contact form.

About the author

Ivan Sulimenko, CEO, Visual and UI Designer

Ivan started his career of a digital artist as a freelancer. In early 2002 he accepted his first full-time job as a resident designer at Web CEO company. Skills of HTML markup, JavaScript and brilliant mastership of design brought him to an idea of creating a single universal service for the markup process perfection.

At the present moment Ivan has his own design-studio with the talented team that already launched a number of well-known web 2.0 projects and a great deal of websites. Ivan is also a CEO in his own projects Divine and Ideas trunk.

11 Comments »

Great idea and potential… IF it would work on a MAC !!! You know that many, many designers are on a Mac and not PC, but the installer is .EXE and thus can’t install. If it’s a plugin for Photoshop, how difficult is it to make it for the Mac OSX ? As a suggestion, note someplace that this is PC only, it’s always annoying to download something only to find out there was no info about it being PC software (and I looked and the the only system requirement you’ve listed is Photoshop). If there IS a possibility to install it on a Mac, let me know, I’m all ear for it!!!
Comment by Marlyse Comte — July 31, 2009 @ 7:32 pm
Can this be used on a Mac? I would love to use this but I have a Mac. Please let me know. Thanks!
Comment by John — July 31, 2009 @ 7:43 pm
Far be it from me to say anything negative about this program you have designed it’s brilliant for your average run of the mill type person looking to theme there own wordpress theme. However you have some serious issues to contend with. Saving all images as gif? Markup that is less than desirable for most real web designers who want clean markup. With that said there is nothing wrong with the program and I’d love to see where it goes and what new features will be coming out for it. Claps for bringing something that will probably add more fire to the wordpress engine.
Comment by Patrick — August 2, 2009 @ 6:25 am
Perfect, that is the best I can explain it. I would love to be a beta tester as well. This tool is awesome. Best thing for creating Wordpress designs, and seems to be pretty solid already. I look forward to trying out future versions as well. Thank you for your time put into creating something this useful to the design community.
Comment by Kevin S — August 3, 2009 @ 2:38 pm
Congrats on your initial launch. Hopefully this will work as you anticipated. This reminds me of a similar program called SiteGrinder, which is also another awesome program. you state that Divine will output “W3C Valid Shorthand” and I have checked every single page on your site and none of them are valid. Each page is loaded with numerous errors. I also checked the demo of the swimsuit theme and it also has numerous errors and does not pass validation, was just curious if you could explain that. So I am going to download it and test it and see what happens and i will come back and post my results. Overall I think you may be on to something.
Comment by PSD to HTML — August 4, 2009 @ 4:45 pm
I`ve registered three times with 3 different email adresses, but nothing happens? Where can i get this Software? I don`t think that you really have developed such a Tool.
Comment by Patrick Dolinski — August 6, 2009 @ 6:12 pm
I have installed it but nothing appear in Photoshop Photoshop CS3 v 10.0.1 fr
Comment by Nico — August 13, 2009 @ 3:09 pm
please make available for osx snow leopard. Looks fantastic so far
Comment by Luke — September 25, 2009 @ 11:19 am
Guys, truobles that might have scared you from the very start have already been eliminated, the site works properly and so does the program. If Divine doesn’t appear in Photoshop after installation, please go to: File->Automate->Divine. If you still cannot get the download link, please use a contact form. And don’t forget about our forum, the main place to discuss, suggest and advise: http://divine.ideastrunk.com/
Comment by Olga — September 29, 2009 @ 11:46 am
Nice software. I have actually used it, but to be quit honest, nothing beats a hand coded theme. Good luck guys, hope you do well.
Comment by Convert PSD to WordPress — January 10, 2010 @ 7:16 am
MAC!!!!! Great service, please get to a mac version ASAP!
Comment by iinly.com — April 5, 2010 @ 7:37 am