Define top 3 reasons why psd to wordpress is so popular?

Hi Justin,

I might not fully get the context of your question. But wanted to add my two cents. I have been working in Website Development since last decade, and have worked Solo developer as well as within the teams.

Most of the time for any good budget project, there is distinct design which is needed, and it is duty for the designer to work with the client to produce good looking, professional design which represent the brand and the goals. Just the PSD or any other format for images, sometimes just mockups/sketches or hand drawings with design guidelines for colors, and layout etc..

It is quick and easy to go back to client with those design images/psd and after their feedback tweak them, it is iterative process until client is fully happy with the design layouts, looks and feel.

Now we can take those PSD's and give to front-end designer to convert into html/css/js and then that html is provided to back-end developer who then builds/code the functionality using the perfectly designed and approved layouts. So programmer's job is now to make the features work, without any worries about design back and forth about layout or small design tweaks. And client gets the final product which looks exactly the way PSD/Design were approved, and works/behave according to the features/spec list.

Now above is the process mostly employed by web dev teams to deliver custom websites and software.

I realize you might be saying why PSD and why WordPress, why not other design softwares like GIMP or Sketch ... and why not other CMS softwares like Drupal, or Joomla or web frameworks like Laravel (Php) or Rails(Ruby) or django(Python) and many other JS based packages out there.

Now Photoshop and WordPress are totally different softwares, one is paid commercial, other is free , open source. Both have become so popular as you mentioned, and reasons can be very different for each of the software.

I myself WordPress developer who switched from Joomla, I would say it was the productivity and flexibility and lot of new features in 3.0 version like CPT/Taxonomies which made me switch to WP. Also dashboard for WordPress is awesome that anyone can start to use it to manage content after site is developed. There are lot of themes and plugins and also new features being added to the core to keep it up to date, i think for any website needing CMS capability, WordPress is the best choice. You can get most done with minimum time and effort. Also you can spend lot of time and budget to make it as custom and as personalized for the project that you love the flexibility and extendibility of the WordPress core.

1) Easy to convert and update into wordpress theme.
2) Plugins provides lots of functionality by simply installing in wordpress.
3) No big issues are faced by the website owners or coders in database connectivity.

I've never used Photoshop for designs.
Mock-ups, yes.
Designs, no.

PSD does not always translate into HTML without issues.

As mentioned, why not GIMP? Or Paint? Honestly, same difference.