How to Build a Web Page in Photoshop

Photoshop is a very versatile program. Not only can you manipulate images in amazing ways, but you can create documents, brochures, flyers and even web pages. Yes, you can create your own website using Photoshop. When you choose your website host, they often have stock web pages to choose from, but that is now way to stand out. You could pay a website designer a ton of money, or you could do it yourself.

The philosophy here is to create a unique design that says a lot about you and the business that you want to portray. Then, you want to transfer that image and those words to the internet for all to see. To start with, you may want to create a layout on paper just to get a feel for where you want text or graphics to go, or where to put captions and boxes. With that in mind, you can begin shaping your page. Create circles, ovals, squares and rectangles that will house your information. For example, I might have a header for the name of my company with an oval in the upper left corner for the logo, a few rectangles for text, a square on the right hand side for site navigation (you know, Home, Blog, Guestbook and other pages on your website), and maybe another rectangle as a footer for my copyright information.

Moving on, there's the color scheme. Photoshop allows for hand picked color gradients of any shade. You can pick a primary color and change the hue until it's just right. You'll want about three shades of your chosen color; a dark one for text, a light one for the background and a mid range one for your logo. Of course, this is only a suggestion. Then there's the text. Choose a font, its size, shape (you can make it arc, it doesn't have to be straight), etc. and put it in the appropriate part of your layout. You can have your text paragraphs ready in a Word document and simply copy and paste them into the paragraph palette in Photoshop.

Manipulate your images and your logo. Using Photoshop, you can create a logo from scratch, or you can work with one that you bought, took a picture of or scanned into the computer. Just make sure you are not infringing on anyone's copyright. You can sharpen the image and even edit it pixel by pixel.

You'll be working with layers, so you'll probably want to make sure that the individual components have their own layer. Once all of the layers are stacked up you have your web page. By working with layers, you can alter just a piece of your page without having to change the whole thing.

So, now that you have created your web page with Photoshop, you need to move it to the internet. This is the part that can be more difficult, but with a program like Adobe Dreamweaver or SiteGrinder you can convert all that you have done into an HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) or CSS (Cascade Style Sheets) code which can be uploaded to the internet.