A Brief Reminder on PSD to CSS Conversion Process

Internet has grown on to become in the most powerful marketing platform and at the same time websites have come a long way from being interlinked pages containing text and pictures. They have become visually attractive and functionally dynamic. PSD to HTML has emerged as one of the most revered techniques of web development as it allows you to achieve a unique looking website with high amount of robustness. One of the driving forces behind this is the CSS or the Cascading Style Sheet and no wonder professional developers around the world put a lot of weight behind PSD to CSS conversion while developing a website.

You might be wondering what exactly is this PSD to CSS and why is it considered to be so important for web development. To start with you will have to agree to the fact that a unique looking website themed around a business will add a lot to the brand value. Now you can’t achieve this solely designing a website in HTML or any other webs based technology. The fact is they are coding language or a platform and not design tools. This is why most traditional websites looked identical as there was little you could have done to their look and feel.

This is where you use the awesome power of Photoshop comes in to play as there isn’t a better design tool in the market. You can run your imagination wild while designing a website with this tool and play with graphics, images, colors and gradients. But why convert PSD Design  to HTML/CSS? The answer is quite simple Photoshop files aren’t compatible with the web and need to be converted into a suitable markup such as HTML or XHTML to ensure that they render on a web browser. The CSS file serves as the backbone of any website as it describes the way semantics are presented in an HTML document. It defines how the HTML/XHTML website appears on the web browser.

In this process the Photoshop file is sliced where different sections of the website are separated to define their functionality. These image files are then coded into coded into HTML/CSS to make it ready for the browser. The coding is done manually using semantic coding techniques which ensures that the websites are search engine friendly and have a lighter code base. In the next step the coding undergoes W3C validation which checks for errors in the coding and validates the code for improved performance which is important in this highly competitive Internet environment.

There are a lot of advantages that PSD to CSS conversion brings to your website. First and foremost it lends uniformity to the website in terms of color scheme, fonts, image size etc. which are vital for the brand value of your website. Secondly CSS helps in keeping the code base short which helps in reducing the load time of a website on the browser. This conversion also makes the website cross browser compatible which help in increasing its popularity and appeal. Along with this it also plays a vital role in making websites device independent.

Both the HTML and the CSS files play complementary role towards each other and it would be difficult for you to achieve a visually attractive website. This conversion job needs high level of skills and expertise on the part of the developer and only the most proficient of developers can give your website the competitive edge. Make sure the developers you hire have knowledge of manually coding a website and have sound knowledge of tools such as HTML5 and CSS3.