Learn Photoshop Now - Photoshop Web Template, a Web Site Design Guide

Those unfamiliar with web design are many times overwhelmed by slices and Javascript rollover and cast aside their projects out of aggravation and disappointment. The goal of this tutorial is to stay frustration free by designing a web page using only 2 graphics.

First, let's make a banner and place it in a table containing 5 rows and 1 column. We will place the banner in the top row. The text for your site and any photos you might like to include will be in the next row. Row 3 will contain a separator, row 4 will be set for your text links and a copyright notice, and row 5 will hold a second separator.

For this tutorial, let's call our site just that "Our Site." Now to find a graphic for the banner we're creating. There are plenty of good images to be found at several of the free stock photo sites and for only a small fee, you can find top quality, professional images on some of the online galleries. Try the iStockPhoto gallery for beautiful illustrations or photos that at only a few dollars can add quite an upgrade to the presentation of your site design.

One tip is to choose one color from your graphic and utilize various shades of this color for your banner for a clean, coordinating look. For the sake of naming a color for this example, we'll go with green in a dark, medium and then light shade.

I find that by using the opacity slider on a sampled color you can create a nice variation. Open a new document and copy and paste the main graphic you've chosen into it. Now from the toolbox select the eyedropper tool and sample a color by clicking on it in your graphic. This will change the foreground color square in your toolbox.

Now open another new document and in the Background Contents choose White and click OK. Create a new layer by going Layer > New > Layer with this document open. Next go to Edit > Fill and select Contents, Use: Foreground Color. This process will fill your document with the color you just sampled. The trick here is to reduce the opacity using the slider and adjust it until you find an appealing shade. After selecting your shade, flatten the image by going Layer > Flatten Image. Use the eyedropper tool again, only now to change the foreground color square in your toolbox to match your newly created color. Click on the color square and the color picker will appear, and you can make note of the numbers of your new color.

I went through my fonts and settled on Onyx regular. When you find a font that works for you, try playing with the tracking, the leading, and the scale - or a combination. It makes it more personal and unique when you include some tweaks.

To select a font in Photoshop go Window > Character. In the palette you'll see a list of your installed fonts. To tweak the settings you'll need to bring up the Paragraph palette. You can do this by going Window > Paragraph.

If you are looking for new fonts, you have many options. Free font resources are available to you online.

Create a new document that is 600 x 300 pixels. You can change this size to suit your own design when you pick your own stock photo and plan the layout accordingly.

Now I'll create a new layer, Layer > New Layer and I'll call it Designer Girl. I'll place the illustration on this layer and shrink it to fit. You shrink your graphic by choosing Edit > Transform > Scale. The bounding box will have handles. Use the Shift Key to constrain proportions, and shrink your image by selecting the top left handle and pulling towards the bottom right. To move the graphic, drag inside the bounding box. Click enter when you're happy with the results.

Now we need a tinted background. I'm going to use the lightest shade of blue.

I select the background layer, Layer 1, and I fill it with the light pink by going Select > All, then Edit > Fill, and in the dialog box in Contents, I select Use: Color and in the Color Picker I enter FBE0EC.

The result is a 600 x 300 banner with a soft background shade and with the graphic placed on the left. It's starting to look like a web page.

I've chosen to apply a thick stroke to the background layer to make for a more bold design. First make sure the Layer 1 background layer is active, and make a copy with steps Layer > New > Layer Via Copy. Next double-click next to the layer name. Blending Options in the Layers Style dialog box will appear.

In the Styles options on the left side, select and click on the word Stroke. I changed the settings to Size: 7px, Position: Inside, Blend Mode: Normal, Opacity: 100%, Fill Type: Color for my site and then clicked the color swatch and entered the number of the darker green shade in the color picker. Click OK.

The border is just to balance out the design, so by all means make changes and get creative with your own ideas.

Let's place the names of the major sections directly on the banner. These will be the website links. We will be using image maps since it will be only one graphic.

Create a new layer for your words. Use the type tool to create the section names and then use the move tool to position them exactly to where you want on the banner. Major Note: pick a color for your text that is darker than your background color!!! Otherwise it will either blend in or you won't be able to see it at all. Do this by going Window > Character. In the Character palette you'll find a color square that you can click on to change colors.

You'll need an HTML editor like GoLive or Dreamweaver to automate this process. It's really very simple. You make little "maps" over each word and then enter the link destination. If you don't have an HTML editor you'll need to do a Google search on image maps to find a tutorial, or buy a book like Elizabeth Castro's HTML Quickstart Guide to help you out.

Now create a new document with a width of 600 pixels, and a height of about 12 pixels. Fill this with your background color. Then, using the text tool and a dark color, type some periods, like this:... and place them in the file, centering them. Change the size and the spacing until it looks perfect. Save this as a GIF file.

In your HTML editor of choice make a simple table containing 5 rows and 1 column. If you're planning to use text link navigation below the banner instead of image maps on the banner, make an extra row ending with 6 rows in your table. Now put your elements into the individual rows of the table and you're done.

If you are on deadline and can't cope with learning any more Photoshop techniques or HTML, here's another solution. You can buy a ready-made template from Template Monster that you can use as a base to create web pages in Photoshop.

On Template Monster you will find a pulldown menu on the front page where you can pick options or features and then carry out a search for a template. The templates are reasonably priced and fairly simple to handle in GoLive or Dreamweaver. There have been times that I have acquired a template just for the images and color scheme. This has proven to be less costly than using stock photos with a fee. Take a look at Template Monster to explore the huge variety of web templates they have available.

Hopefully this tutorial will help you create something wonderful that will take your new website in the direction you aimed for. Good Luck

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