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Advertise here with BSA There are lots of web apps these days and they are very popular because of time-saving and productivity benefits. Web apps work on almost all platforms and you can access them from any device. You don’t need to install anything and you can save lots of time in this way. In [...]

Apple’s Keynote is already renowned for awesome design, thoughtful typography, and generally beautiful templates. For design-savvy presenters, Keynote is always the best route to take for slides that astound and engage your audience. Today we’ll be taking a look at 10 beautiful examples of Keynote Templates, each with the capacity to make your carefully-crafted presentation [...]

This series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace’s hosting solutions here. Mac OS X is a popular platform for developers and designers of all stripes. Apple has always had strength in the graphic design market, but even before Apple’s shift to Intel processors in 2006, developers started [...]

In 2009 we’ve witnessed many talented and generous designers creating tons of amazing stuff and giving it away for us to use. We’ve already shown you all of the best free fonts from this past year. Now we’re going to show you the best free icon sets. There were plenty of free sets created this year, but these stand above the rest in terms of quality and usefulness.

Basic

Onebit Icon Set 2

Hand Pointer Icons

WP WooThemes Ultimate Icon Set

Led Icon Set

MinIcons

Grunge Peeling Stickers

Onebit

Web Injection

Watercolor Icon Pack

Finance

Flavour Extended

Social Media Icons

Must Have Icons

Social Icons Hand Drawn

Weby Icons

Quartz

If you’re the type of Web Designer that doesn’t like to get your hands dirty with XHTML and CSS, SiteGrinder 2 could become your best friend. It’s a plugin for Photoshop that can turn a design into a fully functional website. This means you will no longer need to outsource the programming of your designs.

Enabling Photoshop to Do More

Out of the box, Photoshop is a robust graphics package with a powerful set of tools that enable designers to work their magic and create visually stunning web designs. In a typical web site creation workflow, when the design process is finished, so is Photoshop’s role. However, if you’re using SiteGrinder 2, Photoshop becomes a fully functional web page building solution. It’s a plugin that makes the transition from design to code seamless.

SiteGrinder 2 also ensures that the integrity of the design is maintained. This is so important for designers. Often times in a typical web site creation process, important aspects of a design have to be omitted because they require complex coding. SiteGrinder 2 makes sure that your design will look just as good in the browser as it does in Photoshop.

The main aspect of SiteGrinder 2 that designers will love the most is the fact that no coding knowledge is required. All of the code is generated by the plugin and it happens behind the scenes. And if you are the programming type, SiteGrinder 2 is going to be a huge time saver. There’s no longer a need to switch to Dreamweaver or TextMate after your design is finished. SiteGrinder 2 does all of the coding for you, leaving you more time to tweak your design.

So How Does it Work?

This explanation of how SiteGrinder 2 works is going to be short, because it’s such a simple process. It’s all about how you name your layers in Photoshop. The plugin requires special “hints” that tell it what each layer should be. For example, if you have a button in your design, just add “-button” to the end of its layer name, or “-rollover” to define its rollover state. Of course, for some designers this will mean actually being organized with their layer naming and overall PSD structure, but this is something that web designers should get in the habit of doing anyway. Plus the time saved by using this plugin makes it a non-issue. These hints are also used to create more complex web site elements, such as drop down menus, forms, multi-media content and more.

Basic or Pro

SiteGrinder 2 comes in two flavors: Basic and Pro. The right version for you will really depend on the functionality requirements of your sites. The Basic version gives you all the standard features, but does limit you to using solid color backgrounds. Going Pro will give you more options for background images and the added ability to easily create photo galleries, include Flash media, and add forms to your pages.

When products come along that claim to make difficult and complex tasks “push button” easy, it’s natural to be skeptical. However after using SiteGrinder 2, I’m convinced that this is a powerful plugin that can make a web designer’s job much easier.

Visit the official SitGrinder 2 site to learn more about this product.