Designing and outlining your website in a program like Photoshop is extremely different from ensuring that design is converted into a fully functional responsive website. How can you get from the former to the latter? It isn’t easy, but if you follow this article, you’ll learn the best ways to convert Photoshop PSD to responsive HTML that will ensure the website visitors are satisfied.
Converting the Design into a Website is a Balancing Act
Although many people decide to create highly creative and elaborative designs in Photoshop with many layers and the highest quality assets, the simple fact is that it is almost impossible to translate a design like that into a fully functional website. There are many reasons for this:
- The high-quality assets will take too much time to load: internet bandwidth is not infinite, and website loading speeds are extremely important if you want to rank in the Google Search Results Pages and have people actually visit and view your website. Really high-quality assets, even with lazy loading, will increase loading time and decrease responsiveness.
- Highly elaborative and convoluted animations and designs take a lot of time to implement in code: there’s no magic application that can convert your photoshop files into functional website code. You need to rewrite most of your design in code. And although doing simple design work in CSS, HTML, and JS is relatively simple, it is not nearly as streamlined as Photoshop. You don’t want to take months converting the design.
It’s precisely these two reasons that necessitate striking a balance between design and practicality. You don’t want a simple generic design that doesn’t make your website stand out and you don’t want a highly complex design with all the baggage that comes with it.
Where is the right balance? That’s a hard question to answer and will change on a project-by-project basis. It depends on the amount of time, effort, and money you want to spend on the project, and how much returns are you expecting.
Make Sure You Have the Required Skills for the Endeavour
As you could probably tell from the previous section, converting Photoshop designs into fully functional websites is no simple task. You need to make sure you have the required skills in computer programming and web development so that you can successfully be able to convert the design into a functional website.
- HTML and CSS: these are the building blocks of the Internet. Literally every website will be converted to HTML and CSS one way or another before getting displayed. Web browsers won’t even display a website if it isn’t using these two formats. Even if you are using a more advanced framework that converts your code automatically into HTML, you still need to learn these languages to be able to successfully debug your website.
- JavaScript: JavaScript is how you give your websites life – it is the language you use to ensure that your menu drops down when you hover over it with your mouse, it the language that is responsible for most of the animations on the web page, and it is the language that helps your website become interactive. You need to have sufficient knowledge of it if you truly want to convert your design into a website.
- Back-end frameworks: the backend of the website will be your server – this is where you store and analyse user data, serve web pages to visitors, and much more. Although the backend isn’t responsible for the design of the website at all, it is still a crucial part of web development without which your website won’t function. You need to learn about the different backend frameworks and choose one that best suits your needs.
