PSD to HTML Reviews & Tutorials

Constant increase in the number of PSD to XHTML service providers has pushed the total number of conversion service providers well beyond 100. A new service provider with same offering and at same price, like others may fail to spice up the competition, but it certainly elevates the confusion in the mind of customers while making the choice. The abundance in choice creates a hotchpotch and makes the whole process of hiring a PSD to XHTML service provider complex.

What makes it more confusing for the prospect is not only the core service or price but also the similarity in auxiliary features such as money back guarantee, online-chat, discount and others, which each service provider proffers.

Resemblance is not only limited to services, features or pricing but can also be seen in design, usability, navigation and some of the marketing activities followed by these firms. In a quest to become the customer’s favorite companies are ending up in imitating each other.

The rationale behind this dedicated imitation by majority of these service providers let it be in any form, is sharing the pie of success already achieved by someone.

With this post we are starting a series of posts which will discuss about each of these aforementioned factors due to which choosing a PSD to XHTML conversion service provider has become so enigmatic.

With a market share of 4.6%, Chrome is now the third most popular browser trailing Safari behind.

The latest data from research firm Net Applications show that Google Chrome reap major benefits among users and seems to retain the podium one captured earlier in December in the case of the most used browsers on the Internet.

From November to December increasing namely Google Chrome by 0.7 percent on the net and passed thus Apple’s Safari on the list of the most used browsers on the web. Given that the browser is only a little over a year old, it is a right impressive feat.

Several factors contribute to change. To begin with, Internet Explorer has been steadily losing users and has since January 2009 has lost about seven per cent market share. This has been mainly caught up by Firefox and Chrome.

Another factor that probably influenced some of Chrome is released for OS X and Linux, which certainly attracted some new users. The third factor is that Chrome now works with the additions, which further enhanced the functionality.

The change resulted not only a temporary boost, but the browser looks to keep its users, according to figures.

Internet Explorer (all versions included) still account for 62.69 percent of the market, while Firefox is at 24.61 percent. Chrome to third place has been 4.63 percent and Safari 4.46 percent. Opera is in fifth place with 2.4 percent of users, followed by Opera Mini at 0.53 percent.(source)

Something that should be mentioned is that the Net Applications numbers are based on the traffic that occurs on a large number of selected Internet sites, which means that data is not 100 percent, compared with the actual use.

This December, BestPSDtoHTML.com will celebrate its very first Christmas. And to make this occasion even more special PixelCrayons has selected our platform to distribute their Christmas Discount to all our readers, followers and visitors.

Now how you can avail this discount. The process is straight and simple, below are the details, which should be followed.

The interested ones just have to visit the website and follow some details below:-

• Click on the ‘Christmas Offer Banner’ on the right corner of the website.
• Fill the offer form with all correct mandatory information.
• A mail with a Coupon Code will be sent to you to avail the 15% discount.
• Visit the site to avail the offer.

*Comment or tweets are not necessary to avail this discount, but if you will, it will be highly appreciated.
*In case you do not receive the coupon code, we request you to check your spam box.
*Discount Coupons are available on the site until 25th December’ 2009 and can be used till 5th January’ 2010.

About Company:-

XHTML.PixelCrayons.com is a PSD to HTML/XHTML/CSS conversion service providers. They also offer implementation into skins, themes, CMS, shopping carts and more. The turn around time promised by the company to deliver quality is 8hrs. To know more about them, visit at http://xhtml.pixelcrayons.com

As designers, artists and illustrators, we all need some inspiration from time to time. It’s what makes us creative people. We take in the things around us and our brains process it, turning what we’ve seen and heard into thoughts and ideas.

If you work as a professional designer, there will probably be times when you are bereft of ideas and need some help. Turning to the coffee jar is going to make you buzz, but this doesn’t necessarily create ideas. What you need, is inspiration…

Take this scenario for example – your deadline is in the morning, its 3am and you’re struggling to get down a design concept for a new website. Where do you turn? You’re tired and the creativity just isn’t flowing.

I’ve been here many times before, and I find the best way is to relax and forget about it while I browse other websites. Subconsciously, I take in the design and functional elements of these sites I visit. My brain processes this and before I know it, I can apply this array of ideas to my own work, within my own context and utilising my own initiative.

Another great way of getting some help is to ask for feedback from your peers. You can post on related design forums or ask a friend over Messenger. If you receive professional and constructive feedback, this could be absolutely invaluable to creating a successful design.

Never be afraid to ask. A lot of people don’t like criticism because it can dent their self-esteem but if taken on board, it really can make a difference. I learnt this in my first job. I designed email newsletters and every time I submitted a piece to my boss, believing it to be finished, she would nearly always make comments. Two or Three renditions later, and taking on board the bosses comments, I had a piece of work that I could truly be proud of.

This article was written by Matt Saunders. Matt runs Creative Feedback, a design community website designed to give you constructive feedback and design ideas.

As any successful business will tell you; planning is key to success. It’s never too early to start thinking about your future strategies, and what better time to put some new ideas into practice than over the Christmas/New Year period?

Many companies and individuals suffer from a lack of appropriate planning and decision making. This leads to an anti-climax in success and in turn, a big drop in enthusiasm for what was once a thriving project.

If you run an online business, set yourself some achievable goals for the New Year:

• Get more targeted traffic – explain how you intend to do this and stick to it. For example, you may want to obtain one new backlink from an authority domain every month for the first six months. Just putting this on paper makes it seem a little more within your reach.
• Improve areas of weakness – ask for customer feedback, ask the opinion of a designer or simply view your stats. Is your delivery policy a little confusing? Maybe that’s putting people off – write a new, more reassuring one!
• Looking to expand your operations? Look at hiring salespeople on a basic fee + commission basis and offer structured bonuses. Alternatively, look into affiliate programs and expand your reach this way.
• Trouble keeping hold of your customers? As long as you’ve captured their data, you can win them back with a nice offer and an intelligent email marketing campaign.
• If you simply need more sales, look at offline avenues such as networking events and cold calling. Whilst these methods are more long winded, they help build relationships, which is a crucial factor in success.

These are just a few ideas that transcend various website purposes. Be specific to your own business and even if your growth plan is relatively small, it’s a step in the right direction.

This article was written by Matt Saunders, owner of Leeds web design agency Northern Web which specializes in intelligent and responsible web design and marketing solutions.

I frequent the LinkedIn.com’s Q&A section on a regular basis and last week, I found an intriguing question:

Are social networks key to improving customer relations and product development?

This prompts an interesting discussion into whether companies should use social tools to promote their business online, and if so, how exactly they should do it.

In short, I believe that yes, companies should be making use of these tools. Nearly everybody has Internet access now, and the social platforms that exist are sophisticated enough to segment user groups for targeted advertising. In effect, we’re now being fed information based on our interests which leads to less annoying adverts and higher conversions for businesses. This is social networking at its base level.

To truly harness its power, you need to delve deeper. Tools such as Twitter can be used to interact with prospects/customers, websites like Digg can be used to share information and Facebook is the place where everybody talks.

And talk people do. Your online reputation and, ultimately, your company’s reputation rests on how you use these tools. You have a platform on which to deliver information directly to your customers – great! Just make sure you don’t hit them with the hard-sell all the time; engage with the community on an almost personal level, dropping your opinion in from time to time and sharing links to informative websites and blogs. Essentially, give them a reason to listen to you.

In turn, you will receive their feedback and reviews of your business. The results will be far better than any questionnaire you could send out. Social platforms allow you to gander much more feedback than you would probably expect, because it allows you to “spy” on what people are talking about. I’d be surprised if any medium-large organisation doesn’t search its company name daily on Twitter to see what people are saying about them. They can then act on this.

I attended a talk by Julian Sambles from the Telegraph a few months back and he was tasked with boosting the online presence of the traditional newspaper. This meant a massive shift in thinking, at every level in the company, was required to be successful. He talked of how they utilised social bookmarking links, and how they explained to the readers what they were; he said how microsites have been used to promote specific offers and how article headlines differ from online to the paper publication (think SEO keywords).

This, as far as I am concerned, is proof that not only is the Internet crucial for business success, but utilizing its many social assets can help boost your growth by interacting with your customers on a more than seller/buyer basis.

This article was written by Matt Saunders, owner of Leeds web design agency Northern Web which specialises in intelligent and responsible web design and marketing solutions.

Are you aware of what your customers, ex-employees or current employees saying about you? And your competitors? Do you have any idea what kind of online conversation is going on about your brand? How such conversations are affecting others’ view point in regard to your organization?

Earlier the spread of news was a slow process, giving organizations ample amount of time to develop structured responses to arising problems. But after the advent of Internet, and the growth of consumer-generated media like message boards, forums and blogs, people quickly air their views and these quick-generated views are indexed by search engines. Building brand is not a child’s play. Thereupon, it is important for business heads to be acquainted with what negative is being said about them. By becoming a regular observant of the conversation, you will be able to take action and deal with malicious information within time. This way, negative publicity of your brand can be avoided and ultimately, the reputation is managed.

Competitor Attacks
The increasing cut-throat competition in the online industry gives rise to unethical marketing practices. Your competitors will not miss out any opportunity to take business away from you. They may carry out an undercover derogatory drive against your product. This form of negative CGM conversation directly affect upon your trademark. In intense case, you may take legal action to limit the damage of your brand’s reputation. The unscrupulous competitors may implement other techniques like ‘Link Smearing’ or ‘Google Bombing’ to infringe your reputation. This is an unethical marketing practice followed by the competitors to damage your online reputation. This can be cured by online reputation management.

Need of Online Reputation Management
It takes years to build and maintain a reputation. A reputation is everything a business relies upon. Online Reputation management is “the practice of consistent research and analysis of one’s personal or professional, business or industry reputation as represented by the content across all types of online media”. The aim of Online Reputation Management is to increase your overall web presence in positive way.

Online Reputation Management is becoming an important strategy for every organization, as the reputation of many companies is being damaged by the wrong response given by others or in the absence of any response. Through monitoring, analyzing and influencing online communications, it helps prevent the loss your business suffered and thereafter, ensures ongoing success of your organization. Moreover, reputation management is not only about monitoring, it’s about taking action. Marketers need to work really hard to keep their reputation alive and maintained. It requires doggedness and an intense determination to succeed.

Every business organization understands the importance of its reputation. Positive reputation builds trust and confidence that last to give positive result, profitability and growth of the business. But a bad reputation does a lot of bad things, resulting in lowering sales and profits in the business.

For a change, this post is for readers from all niches, segments, interests, communities and categories. Even if you have no relation with the world of web designing you shall find reading it worthy. This post discusses many of the necessary points that every blogger, article author or writer will find helpful in making his write-up popular.

Though the title includes blog but don’t limit yourself upto it only. Seek for communities, discussion panels, social networking sites and groups of same interest where you can get good attention.

So, today we will talk about the ways to increase the popularity, readability and people participation on your blog.

• Talk smart, talk wise

The best way to get noticed by the visitors of a blog is to comment. Make your comment logical enough to add some value for the readers. It is not necessary that you always criticize, your comment can be constructive and about the missed out points in the post, if any.

• Leave your print

Make sure that every comment you make you are leaving your own website/blog link their. Who knows which comment prompt the visitor to know about you more and read you more?

• Become a guest

Pick top blogs or website in your related field. Ask them to invite you as a guest blogger, show them some of your best write ups. As these sites already have good reputation and traffic you can use it in your favor.

Now what? Is that all you were striking hard for? You have managed to get noticed and the traffic is seeping to your website/blog. Now how would you keep the visitors glued, below are few points you must look.

• What’s Hot!

No body likes to read stale topics. This makes it necessary for you to stay updated with the current news and discoveries in your related niche like web design industry etc. Always write what people want to listen about and what they are interested in. If you will keep on feeding their curiosity, they will keep on tweeting you.

• Size does matter!!!
  

Thinking of writing your first post of about #%&# words. Why dude? Don’t you wish your readers to return? Why you are so desperate to trickle your whole knowledge over one post? If you think that you will write your first welcome blog of about 2 pages and your visitors will get impressed, think again. Unless you are a big shot in your niche don’t start with life-size posts because no body has time to spend on some unknown name. But if you already are then you don’t need to read this one.
Start with short and interesting posts. Visitors find it easy to read short posts as compared to large ones when visiting some new blog. It will help you keep the readers.

• Take social media into account

And why not when every one does? Digg is buried and Twitter is tweeting.
Make sure that you have twitter widget on your every post so that people can tweet you. Don’t start straight away to people asking for tweeting your post. You will miss your reputation even before its existence. Get involved, talk to people, answer their query related to your niche and let them put their faith on you and believe you.

• About comments

It’s about what and how you have written it. It doesn’t matter if you hold a big name in the industry or not, if the visitor has read your post then it depends entirely on the quality & capability of your post to make him comment. Don’t put a no-follow on the comments. If somebody has read your post and wrote a true comment on it, bringing out some important point then it deserves a link without no-follow. But if you think the comment as a spam then do not moderate it.

It’s not that there is no other way to promote a blog but it has been left for you to write under the post as comment.

A big mistake that most PSD to XHTML services are making is promising cross-browser support for their clients. Cross-browser means the website you coded will render perfectly in all browsers since its release; Yes, that means your website should work in Internet Explorer 4, too. (See the definition of cross-browser and multi-browser)

Multi-browser, on the other hand, is the correct term. Multi-browser means your coded pages will work in Internet Explorer 7 and/or 6, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome.

When designing a good website, it’s very important to think about your potential users, or in the case of a redesign you already have statistics that tells you about your users. Browsers they are using, resolutions, etc.

A good website means rendering it perfectly in those browsers that matters to your users. Here is an example:

You shouldn’t care because this button is one pixel too high in your Mac, but you should care for your 95% of users that use Windows and they’ll see it one pixel too high.

The below example is a perfect example of the most common mistake that it’s being made: to think that you need to offer support for every browsers on the market. You don’t.

When coding a bank project, I got an e-mail to modify the menu because it wasn’t perfect in IceWeasel.

Don’t promise perfect rendering in all browsers, because it’s not necessary. What’s necessary is perfect rendering in the most used browsers, in the browser that your users are using. Each client would want their code to be perfect in IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome – the most used browsers. That’s it. They don’t care about IceWeasel. Promise results that you can deliver.

This post was written and submitted by one of our contributors, Liviu S. Liviu S. is a senior CSS coder running CSS WITH COLOUR, a PSD to XHTML service that offers beautiful and maintainable CSS code with awesome customer service.

Though the ‘Contribute’ page is on; we thought why not make a post on it too. This way more people will get introduced to our new section.
Till now the visitors were only allowed to read and comment on BestPSDtoHTML but from now our new section ‘Contribute’ will enable them to write for us too. This can be done by sending us your post at webmaster@bestpsdtohtml.com .

Requirements:-

All you need to have is sound knowledge of web design industry and a good control over the language (English). The post must be unique and free from plagiarized content. Before publishing, it will be moderated and edited, if necessary, by our experts.

All we need is an application from the interested ones in form of an e-mail. It must contain your photograph, a short description about yourself and your skill sets.

What kind of posts?

Quality stuff! Mainly, tutorials/articles on photoshop, graphic design theory/application, web design theory/application, CSS, HTML, Javascript/AJAX. So you see the ideas for a post are infinite and the choices are ample.

The footer of the post will contain a short description of yours along with a link directing to website of your choice.