Friday, 23 January 2015

Step By Step Walk Through the PSD to HTML Conversion

Nowadays , a very simple rule exists that if you have a business, you must make sure that your business has an online presence via a unique website that represents your services on the web. In order to create a simple website, you must have a design and addition to that, an HTML converted from your design, which will be used as a static or dynamic website by nature. So, one of the most important aspects of getting a website built is to convert your design to a very basic web structure that a browser can understands – and that aspect happens to be HTML.

With this post, I intend to share essential steps you can't afford to miss when you are converting your PSD to HTML. I also assume that you are aware of HTML structure and code implementation which is required to understand this post:

1) Gather the basic working idea of your website

Understand what structure you want to have for your website, for instance, what buttons should be used, what kind of boxes should be implemented, which part of CSS is required to implement, and so on? This can help you in planning your HTML skeleton as well as the resources you will need to obtain after image slicing step.

2) Analyzing your PSD file or your design

PSD files represent the photoshop design documents. It's a universal format of developing designs by professionals around the world using a powerful tool called Photoshop. Analyzing your design means that you need to understand and objectify what elements are included in the PSD, what specific actions need to be associated with those elements, for example, whether yu want extra gradient with texts or how you want the design to be coupled with each other in form of layers or what background image (or images) do you wish to use so that you can further identify the exact element or pattern to be used in next step.

3) Slicing up the images

Till this point, you have a pretty good idea about what all elements can be managed directly by HTML like colors, borders or even gradient and what all elements you need use from your design files that is PSD. Start reviewing design files in terms of reusable material in accordance with to convert PSD to responsive HTML e.g. a small 1px image which should be implemented with repeat function of HTML, check for color codes using PSD which you will be using with HTML codes like RGB or alphanumeric color codes. Once the you are done with identifying those elements which you can not use directly in HTML and those elements which are essentially required as images. Now start extracting elements accordingly from your design files and save them with specific name structure you wish to have with your HTML.





4) Generate CSS and HTML structure

Once the images are sliced up and ready to be used, decide what HTML structure you should use like flexible width or fixed width, responsive or adaptive once you have decided your next step will be to create a basic skeleton using default tags of HTML like <header>, <footer>, <body> etc. Once the skeleton is in place, insert elements within that skeleton with the help of tags like <section>, <div>, <ul>, <li>. Now once the elements are listed in there you now need to style them with your CSS codes. This step involves minutely reviewing each of the inserted element and writing defined code for that element. Once you have assigned the style to each of the element your HTML of that page is almost ready to be used.

5) Finalize with test

This step will probably be the most important step after you completed your style. You need to check your created HTML with all of the browsers you have written style and HTML for. You will see different design breaks or missing elements with your HTML on different browsers. Create a list of all such issues and once you have checked your HTML on all browsers, it time to fix the issues from list. Keep repeating the process till you have your spot on HTML ready.

These are basic but necessary steps of creating a full HTML. In case you find it difficult enough to handle by your own, I would suggest you to discuss things with any professional or take his/her services to convert your designs to HTML. A browser compatible and hand coded HTML is what is considered as best quality HTML and industry standard so you need to make sure when you are checking HTML, it should reflect these qualities always.

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