Learn Adobe Photoshop - Top Tips

By David Peters

It is no easy task to actually build a working site that matches a visual design created in a tool like Photoshop. Photoshop is designed to give total freedom to the artist. The web, on the other hand, is built on top of many confusing technologies and standards that place other concerns ahead of preserving visual design integrity.

The programming languages that are necessary to create visually pleasing web sites such as XHTML, CSS, javascript, etc., can take months or even years to learn. Understandably this situation has intimidated many users who are good at Photoshop but don't want to spend months or years learning the gory details of the internet.

SiteGrinder 2 successfully turns Adobe Photoshop into an easy-to-use and powerful website design and production tool. While SiteGrinder is not aimed solely at the web neophyte, a SiteGrinder-equipped designer with no previous web experience can use only their Photoshop skills to go from concept to deployment of a professional, standards-compliant site in mere hours with no slicing or programming.

The difficulty of this task is invisible to the user as SiteGrinder builds graphics, text, and interactivity using modern web standard technologies and takes into account tricky requirements like cross-platform browser compatibility.

You are comfortable with Photoshop and SiteGrinder knows CSS, HTML, and web image formats. You create special layers, such as buttons, by adding "hints" to the layer names.

Often times the only things required to create interactivity such as "button", "rollover", and "popup" can be easily created using "hints". Once you've added a few hints in Photoshop you can simply open SiteGrinder and create your page with a simple mouse-click.

This unique system works the way you do, turning web design into a more creatively satisfying activity. Enable your web site's functionality as you design it, quickly testing it out live in a web browser whenever you feel like it.

Such a flexible workflow even allows you to make major design changes, like selecting a new background color, at the very last minute without headaches! SiteGrinder

You may wonder how SiteGrinder can make many web pages from a single Photoshop document. The answer is easy! Photoshop has a little-used but powerful tool called the "layer comps palette". This palette allows you to save and name particular document states, including the position and visibility of every layer.

All you have to do is make the document look the way a page on your site should and then make a layer comp. Then set up the next page and repeat. SiteGrinder will use those comps to decide what to include on the web pages it produces. Even cooler: if your layer comp names match your button names then SiteGrinder will link them automatically. You don't even have to provide URLs!

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