As an illustrator and print graphic designer (from a time when there was no ‘web’ version of the profession), my first interest in creating web pages arose when I realized I could slice up a page-sized Photoshop image and carefully place all the slices into the cells of a table. This seemed like a great shortcut to creating web pages - and it didn't require the laborious learning of any code. But alas, with dial-up internet hovering around the slow to incredibly slow mark, such pages were a novelty only, and had no place in the real internet world. (My peers laughed at me...!) So I spent many years learning HTML and CSS, and was soon creating fast loading – but graphically anaemic – sites at 640x480 or 800x600 resolutions, forever following the adage that the entire front page, graphics and all, should never exceed 32kb. It's a living... But suddenly, with the spread of speedy broadband connections and screens larger than the door on a toaster oven, I see the ‘sliced-up-Photoshop page’ format returning. Not only that, but with a proliferation of ‘PSD to HTML’ services around to take the load off code-wary designers, there’s no longer a need to learn any code whatsoever. Or is there…? I liken creating a graphically rich web page in Photoshop and using an online service (or a plugin like SiteGrinder) to convert it to XHTML/CSS, to buying a modern car with the engine bay encased in resin. It’s all very well if everything performs perfectly, and you never have to ‘pop the hood’. But what if changes have to be made? Or something falls apart? Have you ever seen the code for some of these ‘SiteGrinder’ pages? 200 Div Tags with highly descriptive names like ‘12’ and ‘44’! I guess it comes down to this; there are quick web page solutions, and there are those with longevity and adjustment. In this way it reminds me of modern computer peripherals. Several years ago I had a colour laser printer. It cost the earth, but whenever it broke down it was fixed. More recently I bought a much cheaper colour laser which had pretty much the same output quality. But when it decided to make a whirr/click/click noise and refused to print on one side of the paper, I was told it’d be cheaper to buy a new printer. That, I believe, is the issue with cut-and-paste websites. If you have to make too many changes, rather than wading through all the CSS and images and div tags, just do it over again. So is there a shortcut to good web design? No. Just to quick and temporary solutions.
Pay a professional who's knows what they're doing with XHTML/CSS and you'll get good clean editable code As the old saying goes... Buy cheap, twice cheap
If your a good coder, then a design can be coded using as little div tags as possible and as symatic as possible so that if the need to come back in say 4 months to make changes maybe apply a new theme look the "base" has already been done, any good coder can make it so that its easy to follow, understand and pick up at anytime. Im not sure if this is the answer you were looking for, i couldnt quite gather what you were really asking but thats my reply bassed on how i interperted your question
As you tell there are tools which generates xhtml and css from a graphic template but there is not a quick short cut to good web design. I mean you cannot expect a good web from generated codes. If you familiar with CSS/XHTML you can code even 500 DIVS as you want.
I appreciate what you are saying here, Electric Artist. Quick and easy design is like quick and easy money: It's for those who just want the easy. Not that there aren't more and more cool tools out there to facilitate serious design work, but really, at the end of the day, solid markup and styling is the real deal, esp. over the long haul. And frankly, the short cuts take more time to clean up then they were worth. I dunno, but I been doing this thang for a decade now, and the way I see it, most of the time, one gets what one doesn't pay for. And it's not just design work. Programming too. Take ColdFusion and Visual Studio. Not that you can't use either to do excellent programming, but that they are both so often a crutch for those that don't know how to program and don't realize what a mess they are creating. Same time tested and true arguement with WYSIWYG editors. However, let's not get too elitest here. Just as you started with a slicer tool, so did I back in the day, and so to will many start somewhere simple as they start to wrap their mind around web design and development.