Designing a website is far from simple – there are many elements that need to come together to make a good website: the colour scheme and the theme of the website, the design of the individual elements, the content tone and quality, and the user experience. Getting all of this right is quite the challenge, especially if you’re doing it all yourself. You need a lot of tools and programs to help you every step of the way, and Photoshop is one of them. Photoshop allows you to create realistic and stylish designs and go into the minutiae of each element and pixel on your website. You have a lot of leeways to create something truly unique and stylish that will attract a lot of visitors. Sadly, you need to do a lot of work to turn that Photoshop design into a website, and this article will help you learn how you can turn that design in Photoshop into a full-fledged functioning website:
From Photoshop to HTML: A Change In Paradigms
As you start implementing the design in HTML, you have to change the way you think about the project. In Photoshop, you care about style and perfection, you want every little aspect of the design to be perfect, you don’t want any pixel to be out of place, and you do your best to get the highest-quality assets. This all changes when you start implementing the design in code. Pixel perfection is no longer what’s important, but rather, it is usability, speed, responsiveness, and practicality that take centre stage. If you’re a designer first and foremost, and you’re new to coding, this shift in paradigms can be quite the challenge. You’ll probably be ired by the number of compromises you’ll have to make, but there are really no ways around this. Here is a list of things that will change as you slowly convert the design to code:
- Balancing the quality of the assets with loading time: you don’t need the highest-quality assets on your website, but rather, you want assets that look good enough as long as loading speeds are reasonable. If there is a choice between higher loading time or lower quality assets, you should almost always choose the latter.
- Usability and responsiveness over the design: no matter how perfect some element seemed in the original Photoshop design, if it makes the website harder for your visitors to navigate, you need to redesign the element or get rid of it. Usability and responsiveness are of paramount importance. It doesn’t matter how good your website looks if there are no ways for people to navigate it.
Learning How to Use Complementary Tools
Converting a Photoshop design into a website is quite an arduous process, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, it might take weeks or even months (depending on the complexity of the design, of course). This is what makes using complementary tools so vital. This is a fairly popular web development pipeline, and there are a lot of tools that can make the process faster and easier. These tools range from simple programs that extract assets and resize them for web use to more complex ones that assess the quality of the conversion. You have access to a huge to an impressive number of tools on the internet, and you shouldn’t be afraid to include them in your repertoire.
Costs: How Much Should You Spend?
How much time and money should you spend to try to convert your PSD to HTML? Whatever project you’re working on, it is very safe to assume you don’t have unlimited resources. That’s why you need to balance your budget and ensure you’re not spending too much time or money when doing the conversion. A common mistake that many people commit is spending too much time and resources on the conversion to make sure everything is perfect. In most cases, ‘good enough’ will be enough for the things you need the website for, and you shouldn’t let perfection get in the way of that. If you think you can’t do it cost-effectively yourself, it might be a good idea to look into a PSD to HTML service – there are professionals out there who can really do a good job without costing you too much money. Outsourcing is not always a bad idea.