having website designed in photoshop, how to get it coded?

davidle

davidle

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Aug 30, 2010
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i am having every page of my website designed in photoshop. it will be an ecommerce site with a shopping cart and a blog and a video. we'll need to have a shopping cart integrated into the website with paypal and our fulfillment company. we want to have various hover effects where if you hover your mouse over a link, for example, the link might turn a different colour. these type of effects might be on every page.

what type of coder am i looking for (photoshop to xhtml?) and what's a ballpark cost estimate for something like this (8 pages + blog + checkout/shopping cart)? we would like to easily be able to make changes to the website...at least easily make posts on the blog. does that mean it might be a good idea to have our entire site on wordpress?
 


if you're trying to integrate with an existing shopping cart solution, you'll either need a slicer/coder who knows the platform and can slice and integrate at the same time, or someone to slice into html and someone else to wire it up to work with your ecom platform.
 
dchuk said:
if you're trying to integrate with an existing shopping cart solution, you'll either need a slicer/coder who knows the platform and can slice and integrate at the same time, or someone to slice into html and someone else to wire it up to work with your ecom platform.
Click to expand...

um what do you mean our ecom platform? we were planning on designing the checkout forms/fields in photoshop and somehow integrating that with a shopping cart. is that a legit option? or will we have to use one of those generic looking checkout pages where we can't have our logo or ad copy or anything? that's sort of a different point.

so you're saying we need someone who can go from psd to html. then another person who can go from html to our ecom platform?
 
davidle said:
um what do you mean our ecom platform? we were planning on designing the checkout forms/fields in photoshop and somehow integrating that with a shopping cart. is that a legit option? or will we have to use one of those generic looking checkout pages where we can't have our logo or ad copy or anything? that's sort of a different point.

so you're saying we need someone who can go from psd to html. then another person who can go from html to our ecom platform?
Click to expand...

shoulda just found a source capable of being a "one stop shop" =/

it might cost more but it saves you the mess your in now
 
integrating an ecommerce platform is not that easy thing, and your idea of first designing your forms and then having them integrated with your shopping cart, if you're not going to have your own shopping cart custom coded, should be approached the other way around.

- Choose a shopping cart
- See how the checkout process works
- Find a way to integrate the functions you need in it
 
Icecube said:
integrating an ecommerce platform is not that easy thing, and your idea of first designing your forms and then having them integrated with your shopping cart, if you're not going to have your own shopping cart custom coded, should be approached the other way around.

- Choose a shopping cart
- See how the checkout process works
- Find a way to integrate the functions you need in it
Click to expand...

This would be my answer to the question you asked me OP about my response to you, listen to icecube
 
Icecube said:
integrating an ecommerce platform is not that easy thing, and your idea of first designing your forms and then having them integrated with your shopping cart, if you're not going to have your own shopping cart custom coded, should be approached the other way around.

- Choose a shopping cart
- See how the checkout process works
- Find a way to integrate the functions you need in it
Click to expand...

so basically i need to decide on a shopping cart. then, once i've done that, the designer can design the "look" of the checkout process? is that what you're saying? can you give me an example of how the appearance of the checkout process would need to differ depending on the cart?
 
You have to try different shopping cart solutions ( demos are usually available ) and see which shopping/checkout process best suits your needs: shopping process options ( product options, product accessories ), checkout process ( payment integration, shipping options etc )
 
i'm only selling one product. there will be several purchase links on the landing page and that should take the visitor straight to the checkout process. from there they can update how much of the product they want, but usually, they'll just want one. is there a standout shopping cart choice for my simple, one-product needs. (our merchant account is PayPal Website Payments Pro, and we'll need to coordinate things with our fulfillment company, Webgistix.)
 
I personally took the steps that you are taking. What I ended up going with was OSCommerce as my shopping cart. I modified it some to fit my needs but there are a ton of coders out there for it.

Your next step is to have someone take it from PSD to HTML/CSS. A ton of coders can do this step for you and you should be able to get it done at a pretty affordable price. By affordable we're talking less than $50.00.

After that, once you have the shopping cart in mind you want to use, you need to incorporate that into your website. This will be the more expensive part of things because it will take some man hours to complete it properly. I would recommend rentacoder.com or some place like that so that you can get multiple bids and drive the price down to get it completed. But you might be working with a bunch of Indians.
 
good advice phpgator.

is there a difference between the folks who do PSD to HTML/CSS on fiverr for $5 and the folks at sites like psdtohtmlcss.com? are the pages likely to look better if i go with a more professional getup?
 
to get a complex psd (header, columns, main area, footer, etc ) coded in html+css with optimized code ( that actually makes sense, with images loaded via css etc ) for $50 you can only outsource to india or something like that.

It's not something you can do in 1 hour.

I would expect to pay more than that if you go with a good coder.
 
Icecube may be right depending on how extensive the design is. However, HTML/CSS isn't that difficult for anyone who knows basic web development concepts.

Most designs can be completed in an hour with people that know what they're doing. For HTML/CSS I wouldn't hesitate working with an Indian, I just wouldn't prepay and I would stress that the code should pass w3c validation. Since there are so many coders who are knowledgeable in this area, I have seen pricing drop significantly for this work. That would definitely be your next step though. :)
 
Icecube said:
to get a complex psd (header, columns, main area, footer, etc ) coded in html+css with optimized code ( that actually makes sense, with images loaded via css etc ) for $50 you can only outsource to india or something like that.

It's not something you can do in 1 hour.

I would expect to pay more than that if you go with a good coder.
Click to expand...

what makes one code better than the other if it's in HTML, doesn't that mean it's in HTML? which is why fiverr doesn't seem like a bad option, unless i'm missing something (ie, a lot can go wrong).
 
another related question:

if i'm getting something coded, do i need to have all of my sales copy narrowed down exactly how we'll want it? we have dummy text in some sections, and in the FAQ section i might want to add another category, and in some parts i'm not happy with the headlines...but i figured it wouldn't be too tough to go back and change.
 
What is your budget to have this done?
Im not pitching, i just dont see the point in writting a long reply if your being totally unrealistic about costs.
Mentions of fiverr worry me.
 
davidle said:
what makes one code better than the other if it's in HTML, doesn't that mean it's in HTML? which is why fiverr doesn't seem like a bad option, unless i'm missing something (ie, a lot can go wrong).
Click to expand...

clean and not messy code will make it easier to apply changes when needed.
Hand written code makes sense, code generated with some automated tool doesn't.
(ie. div id="producthighlights-top" instead of div id="n_019")
The same big background could be made as a big image to be loaded by the visitor's browser, taking 1 second, or a smaller image repeated to fill the entire area, taking less time to load.

that said, you might be able to find someone to do it on fiverr or places like that, but I guess it would not be someone from western countries ( which doesn't necessarily mean that they suck )

Having your sales copy ready would help, especially considering you're building your site/landing page around a single product.
 
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