Is this effective? Because i love making templates in photoshop but people tell me to split it up into little bits and manually code it with html+css. Any opinions on this?
well personaly ive started out making layouts in photoshop that were insane but uncodable or just a pain in the a** to code. So after coding simple css and xhtml layouts i was able to create a medium between the two and think over how i am going to code the layout while designing it. So overall i keep the coding in mind when designing. Hope that helps - Khaled
So instead of making the design first, write the code and do the images seperaty and add them into the code?
I've found myself a lot of the time just doing both at the same time. I'll start out creating my banner and sides of the design (top and bottom too if needed), go on to creating the buttons and other things. I've found that if you do the whole design in the psd, unless you know what you want it to look like and have a vision you copy a lot of layers and text around that you will never actually need to pull from the psd. Instead, you can just create your menu headers background, and do the text in CSS (unless it is some special text). Kind of hard to explain my method I suppose. But hopefully it makes sense.
I believe by automated he / she meant using it as a wysiwyg. manually coding it would be typing not click and drag.
Yeah, sorry I was being a smart ass, I din't mean any harm by it though Dreamweaver is a very very powerfull tool in the right hands, in the wrong hands it's just a very heavy text editor though.
Dreamweaver is a good tool to try while learning CSS and XHTML. I usually design whatever I want in Photoshop and the think at how I should code it. After you get used to XHTML and CSS you don't need to start coding then 'drawing'. I'd recommend you to learn CSS and XHTML, do a lot of mini sites only in CSS and XHTML, try to learn how to work with the positioning of the elements like divs, paragraphs etc. If you can make the divs stay where you want them to, then coding isn't a problem anymore. Good luck!
Thats good advise, but I wouldn't worry about the X in the HTML. Just learn to code valid 4.01 HTML as we will all be reverting from xHTML to HTML 5 soon enough. Nick
I simply like to call it XHTML. I think it's cooler I don't see any difference between the two anyway.. only a few declarations are changed
i try to design whatever i'm inspired to do and then just learn what i have to if its tricky turining it into light css
the best way to convert a PSD to HTML is to slice the PSD to small pieces and then custom code the xHTML and CSS files. We provide that kind of service so you might want to follow the link on my sig or PM me.
i can code any PSD designs into css tableless... im an old school coder .... i use notepad when coding... and of course photoshop for slicing ... i never used dreamweaver coz i think it'll make me dumb and lazy ... its cool when you memorize all css tags property ... since its hard for notepad to trace your error but it will make you a strict and neat coder once you get used to it ...