Slicing PSD to HTML – an Important Web Design Asset

Web development has become a strategic business direction nowadays; the profitability of a business and the conversion rate of a website depend highly on a few basic yet not so easy to obtain web design requirements. Apart from manual coding, pixel perfection and SEO optimization, image slicing is an important aspect for any PSD to HTML conversion expert. Most business owners and managers choose to outsource HTML conversion services, which reduces costs and ensures flexibility, but at the same time this means that, even if you are a web design outsider, you need to gather some information on the subject in order to ensure you will obtain the desired outcome. One of the good PSD design to HTML conversion practices you need to focus is slicing PSD to HTML5.

Good design skills suppose you are also able to master the process of slicing. Slicing actually means dividing 2D user layouts into multiple image files which will be used in order to design web pages. The first step is to design a Photoshop image similar to what you want to see on your website; then you need to remove elements such as title bars, menus, and buttons using Photoshop’s slicing option. Each slice will become a distinct graphic. Further adjustments will be easier to perform. If you avoid working with a single, flattened image, you will find it easier to manage fonts, colors, spacing and line heights.

Another reason why you should slice web images are: the possibility of animating parts of a large image, designing roll-overs and image maps and image optimization (a small image, for instance, can be stretched or repeated several times so that it will fill a wider space).

Other advantages of this technique is reducing the necessary computer data storage, reducing page weight and helping the webpage load faster, and repeating background images. The last concept refers to the fact that an image will be downloaded from the server and a CSS tool will instruct it to repeat itself by the markup language. This means that the user’s computer will take over some workload from the server.

Getting back to the beginning, when I pictured the image of a business manager willing to outsource the company’s PSD to HTML conversion services, I am pretty sure some of the reasons why image slicing is necessary may seem complicated and hard to understand. So, to put it right, I need to list the main advantage of image slicing – fast loading images. This has a lot to do with the conversion rate of a website. You need to focus on the user’s experience, after all, and if he/she needs to wait more than 2 seconds on a desktop or laptop and more than 5 seconds on a mobile device to have the images on your website loaded (or this is what some research studies have shown), the user will get bored and give up. And this means the only one to lose money and traffic is you.

Another issue is the Internet connection of the user, which is not always very fast. Unfortunately, the users won’t take this into consideration, and you will need to design your web page in such a fashion as to ensure fast loading of images even if the people you are targeting have a poor Internet connection. This takes us back again to image slicing and, to keep things simple, just keep in mind that a good PSD to HTML conversion must not avoid the great advantages of slicing PSD to HTML.