If you want to achieve a visually attractive website you need to design it in Photoshop. This is the most tried and tested technique of designing a website and allows you to customize the design file in terms of color, graphics, images and texts. However Photoshop files are web compatible or in simple words they cannot be rendered by a web browser. This is where they need to be converted into a suitable markup language such as XHML/XHTML. This process involves converting PSD to HTML and PSD to CSS and turning the PSD files into web compatible format.
Distinctive Look - When you convert PSD to HTML you get a distinctive looking website. This becomes a great advantage as your visitors can quickly recognize you. The site can be themed around your business, your products and your target audience giving it brand recognition immediately. You can also customize the functionality of your website based on the needs of your business when you convert design file into a markup language.
Clean SEO Friendly Coding - This is one of the biggest advantages of turning a design file into markup. Since the coding is done manually using semantic coding techniques they are invariably clean which attract search engine crawlers and help your website rank high on the search engine results. The coding also undergoes W3C validation which ensues there are no errors in coding. W3C validated code enhances the overall performance of a website.
CSS Plays Multiple Roles - The conversion of PSD to CSS is one of the most crucial steps in this design formula. Cascading Style Sheet encompasses lot of the design element such as the fonts, color schemes; image sizes etc. helping you keep the code for individual pages shorter. With this web pages become lighter and load faster on the web browsers. Apart from this it also separates the design from the content of the website helping website managers post content freely without altering the structure of the website.
Browser Compatibility - Your website needs to render and function uniformly across all the major browsers such as Internet Explorer. Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. This is exactly what you can achieve when you opt to convert a PSD design into a markup. The codes are interpreted by the web browsers easily resulting in this uniformity in appearance and function. Now you can cater to a large customer base and enhance the marketability quotient of your business.
The above points clearly show you the need and the advantages of converting a design file into a markup language. PSD to XHTML/XHTML conversion however a very skill demanding job and only the best of developers can deliver you expected results. They need to have expertise in slicing a PSD file, hand coding it and creating the Cascading Style Sheet. So, make sure you hire the services of a professional web development company which had handled such projects in the past.