on September 3, 2026
Choppr started in 2006 doing exactly one thing: converting Photoshop design files into hand-coded HTML and CSS. For most of the 2000s and early 2010s, that was simply how a website got built – a designer finished a PSD, and someone else “sliced” it into a working template. I have written about that process, on and off, for years. This post is the honest, current answer to the question those old posts kept dancing around: is it still relevant?
Mostly, no. Here is what actually changed, and what replaced it.
What PSD to HTML actually was
A designer would hand off a layered Photoshop file – every button, icon, and text block on its own layer, fonts and colors implied by eyeballing the file rather than stated anywhere explicit. The developer’s job was to “slice” that flat image into individual assets, measure spacing by hand, and rebuild the whole thing as HTML and CSS that looked pixel-identical to the source file, usually cross-checked in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and whatever else was current at the time.
It was slow, error-prone in specific ways, and entirely dependent on Photoshop being the design tool of record. It worked because, for a long time, it was the only option.
What replaced it
Three things, roughly in order:
- Design tools stopped being image editors. Figma (and Sketch before it) design files are structured documents. Spacing, colors, font weights, and component states are all stored as real values a developer can read directly, not estimate from pixels.
- Design handoff got its own tooling. Figma’s Dev Mode, design tokens, and shared component libraries mean a lot of what PSD-to-HTML used to solve is now handled by the design file itself.
- The deliverable moved from “a template” to “a working site.” Clients increasingly want a finished, manageable WordPress site rather than a set of static HTML files someone else then has to integrate.
What is still true from the old process
Not everything from that era is obsolete. The underlying discipline – matching a design closely, testing across real browsers and devices, writing clean semantic markup instead of whatever a page builder spits out – is exactly what I still do on every front-end project. The file format changed; the standard for the finished result did not.
If you still have PSD files specifically, I can still work from them directly – it is not a blocker, just no longer the default format I expect.
What I actually do now
Front-end development today, for me, means: taking a Figma file (or a finished design in whatever format you have) and turning it into a real, responsive, accessible front-end – and increasingly, building that directly as a WordPress theme rather than a static template someone else then has to integrate. See Front-end Web Development and WordPress theme development for what that looks like today.
This post replaces close to twenty older posts on this blog that covered PSD-to-HTML from every angle – beginner guides, mistake lists, framework roundups. They said roughly the same thing nineteen different ways. This is the one version of that story worth keeping.