It’s not a secret that the Adobe Photoshop can be very helpful while working out the design your future site, and moreover, it can aid you to create the layout when the mockup is already finished and approved by a client. Or, in case you design for yourself, when you feel that you’ve achieved your level of perfection.
The first and the main thing you need is to prepare the mockup for use in a HTML editor, in other words, you need to slice PSD to HTML to make it function in a web environment. PSD to HTML slicing is not that difficult at all, yet you have to obey certain rules to accurately transmit the data.
We usually design images including background, buttons as well as web page sections with the Photoshop. So when slicing PSD to HTML, try to pay highest attention to small elements as they can change the whole layout in case you miss them. If you want to successfully turn your PSD to HTML, slice the page very accurately as minor mistakes can lead to element shift in a resulting HTML file.
There’s a special tool in the Photoshop to slice PSD to HTML. It is called “Slice” (not surprising, isn’t it?) and it allows to cut the whole image step by step into small pieces that you can use further to create menus, clickable buttons and other elements.
When slicing PSD to HTML, you should draw rectangles in which you include the items you’d like to be separated in your website. Going from HTML to PSD, “slice” means to define areas with specific purposes. Typically, header icons and other graphics, logos are sliced alongside with background gradient and footer elements. Sometimes, one of the navigation menus is done through PSD to HTML slicing.
Each slice heeds to be named according to its purpose. For instance, if you’ve made a slice around the image used for header, call it “header_image” for later on it would be easier for you to work with HTML and CSS layout. Slicing PSD to HTML ends up with the “Save” button where you set the type of your images (with GIF, PNG and JPEG being the commonly used image types for the web) and save them to HTML. After that, the real coding begins.