If you own a website, perhaps you are familiar with this problem. You have your images created in an application such as Photoshop, and Photoshop save your source files as PSD files. That is the file format recognized by the image software. When you double click on these files, Photoshop will be launched automatically, and you will be able to continue working on the images.

Some designers are so good with Photoshop that they design entire websites in this application. Sometimes, designs can be really complicated. But here is when trouble starts brewing.

Photoshop is an excellent piece of software. But the problem with PSD files is that you can't upload it to your website so that others can see your work. In other words, PSD file formats are not web friendly. There is additional work to be done before your PSD files can be displayed on the web. If you want to publish your PSD files on the web, you will need to convert the files into a language that is used for web publishing. For instance, you will have to publish your files in HTML (hyper text markup language) or CSS (cascading style sheets). Once your files have been converted, you will be able to upload them into your web server, just like you would with ordinary web pages. You may also edit the HTML coding if you like with any text editor.

As you can see, there are many different ways to publish your PSD files on the web. You choose to publish the files in HTML, XHTML, or pure CSS. The choice is up to you. The language that you decide to publish in depends very much on your own familiarity with the language. For example, if you are more familiar with basic HTML, you may wish to convert your PSD files to just HTML files to that you can make changes to the files whenever there is a need.

The actual conversion process is not exceeding difficult, but it is a task that can take up quite a bit of time, especially if you are not familiar with coding. If you find yourself in a similar situation, perhaps you may wish to consider outsourcing this task to someone who has the skills to do the job properly. Ideally, whoever is helping you do the job should have some background in HTML or CSS coding. This is to ensure that when you get back the files, the coding should be error free. If there are coding errors, your web pages may not display correctly on the browsers.

It is also important that the coding is cross browser compatible. There are many browsers available for download on the Internet. Of course, Internet Explorer is still leading the pack. But Firefox is narrowing the gap rather quickly. Now you have Google Chrome, which is a new (free) browser released by the giant search engine. Make sure that your files display correctly on all the different browsers.