Thread

Ive seen a video tutorial where they build a full web page using photoshop. What do you think about it?

Here is the vid http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBEg8HT60zI

Hi Maiza,

Sorry didn’t have the time to look at the whole of that video before posting this so don’t know how much length it goes into the whole design process but yes you can use Photoshop to mock-up a site, no problem with that but I would personally never ever ever use the save as slices commands or anything like that in Photoshop especially if you use their rendered html code as it just can never ever be up to scratch like it would be if you hand code a site.

Myself personally I always get everything down on paper first so that I know exactly what sections I want and features etc.. I then do paper and pencil layouts so that I know roughly the kind of thing I am looking for. Next up I make some wire-frame designs in InDesign as that is my design tool and then I will (once I like them) take them into Photoshop to flesh them out.

After that I always hand-code everything without using anything like Dreamweaver or Golive as I just prefer to do it this way. It also means that I am not tempted to use any of their clever program specific tricks to get things done. I am a bit of a stickler when it comes to my sites in that I like them to be XHTML 1.0 Strict validated and so code everything (and I mean everything) by hand.

This isn’t to say that you should do it in this way though. It’s whatever is best for the certain user and whatever you feel most comfortable with.

Don’t know if that helps at all though?

Best wishes,

Mark

Code quality is not great, and it can’t compare to hand-sliced design.

Also just remember one rule.

There are no rules! 😉

Whatever you feel most comfortable with is usually the best as you will work quickest in that way but as I said before and Ingmar has re-iterated don’t go near Photoshop’s export tool even with a barge pole!!!

That being said, have fun, be creative and any help you need just holler across the forums as loads of us here are always willing to help out.

Best wishes,

Mark

Quark and Word also both offer an export to web page option which could be good for a few ‘It looks so painful but I just can’t look away’ kind of moments. 😉

Quark and Word also both offer an export to web page option which could be good for a few ‘It looks so painful but I just can’t look away’ kind of moments. 😉

Word? Save as HTML?

*twitch*

Quark and Word also both offer an export to web page option which could be good for a few

Aggggggggggggghhhhh Save me now!!!!

but the design development may vary depending off the kind of page, I mean If its a static html page with information and pictures. But what if Im designing a kind of page like a weblog to use in EE later, then the design should be different, Im in a mess hahahah…

Hiya,

If you are getting in a mess then I cannot more heartily recommend what I said before and that is to make a plan on paper first. This is one of, if not the most invaluable parts of a web-design process that I undertake. Sure it can take a while sometimes but if you get neck-deep in HTML code before you have a solid understanding of what it is that you actually want first then I guarantee you are going to fall a lot of the times before you get to where you want to go.

Best wishes,

Mark

Hi Maiza,

There are no rules. You just do what you think is best. I started out with PageMill (now defunct I think) and I had no idea of html and all the stuff. But, I soon discovered that many pages didn’t work, so I started to clean up the html code, and so I learned html and css as well.

I wouldn’t recommend you to handcode anything until you’re more experienced. Use whatever there is, and eventually you’ll learn the trade. Making web pages is an endless journey of trial and error! And, we all have to start somewhere.

Good luck!

I wouldn’t recommend you to handcode anything until you’re more experienced.

My personal stance on this I’m afraid would have to be the other way in that if I could go back and start all over again then I would want to learn to hand-code first. There are literally hundreds of really great books now that will teach you correct coding techniques. Myself unfortunately I used to use such programmes as Golive and whilst they had really neat features such as a grid that would show over the page that you could then lay items out on the code that this method produced was just awful!!

I would much preferred to have taken a bit more time over that part of the learning process and done it right the first time as I found myself having to un-learn a lot of things that I had been thrown into simply because of the bloat that so called helpful editor programmes had added in.

Just my thoughts though 😉

Good luck with whatever you do and above all just remember to have fun and that in life there is no right or wrong way to do anything, just the way that works best for you.

Best wishes,

Mark

Just to add my 2¢ to the discussion - I think being able to create a webpage first, without learning HTML/CSS, and enjoying the accomplishment would be better encouragement than dealing with code first. After all, the end effect is the same, a nice, pleasing-to-the-eye design. It’s after a new coder gets proficient with the process that they start to look deeper into making their pages better, wanting to understand how things work, and changing it to be more standardized.

I will say no more on this but just to say that I loved the first page I designed years ago, even though if I could find it now I would probably cringe but my fact still remains that I had to re-learn just about everything as the code editors I had used to do it had placed so much code bloat into it that I just thought that this was normal.

Nowadays as I use XHTML and CSS to create pages to me they are around 1,000,000 times neater and easier to code and I really really do wish that I could totally forget all the headaches that I had when I started out from all the errors created by these programmes.

Just my personal observations though and as I can’t go back in time (my time machines in the workshop at the moment 😉 ) if I was learning from the start and knew this and had the time to do so then I would want to learn to hand-code first to save myself the time and headache of all the problems that code editors have. They are after all just programmes, not humans and can never understand all the different variables that we can get our heads around in a design sense.

Just my 2 penneths worth (I’m English so always go for pennies 😉 ) though.