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Is the web designer that you hired suddenly revealing to you that you need to get the design that he or she gives should be converted to XHTML format as he or she does not have adequate skills to perform the conversion required? It is not uncommon for customers to come across such weird situations, these situations become so common we can no more call them weird. The question however you may have is why should the design not be used directly and why should it be converted to XHTML format? Yes, this is a very legitimate question or doubt which you should get clarified so that you know that your web designer or your service provider is not taking you for a ride.

Firstly, you should know that the internet is run by nothing but series of programs and if you want your website to be displayed correctly in people’s browsers your website should be in a compatible format. Website designers use programs such as Photoshop to create the initial design and then convert them to the compatible format and the conversion process is termed using different names such as slicing, chopping, markup and so on. The fact is that the files that are designed in Photoshop will be in PSD format, the internet programs and the browsers will not understand this format. Moreover search engines will not be able to crawl through PSD files and understand the content of the pages. So PSD to XHTML conversion becomes a very important step in the website design process. All the browsers and search engines understand the pages in XHTML or HTML fully. You will not run into any problems if a page is code in standard XHTML or HTML. Your web designer is therefore not taking you for a ride when he or she tells you that PSD to XHTML conversion should be done. However, this information should have been given to you right before you hired the web designer that he or she does not have the required skills to covert PSD to XHTML so that you could have found someone with the required skills.

PSD to XHTML conversions in fact requires good coding skills and not all web designers posses such coding skills, they will be simply talented and qualified to use programs like Photoshop and they may not have any XHTML skills.

Only when your web pages are in XHTML format search engines will be able to index the content and rank you in the search results. Most importantly it is important that such PSD to XHTML conversions are done professionally and not in some half-baked manner which will throw the search engines off balance while crawling your web pages. You should either find a company that will take care of the entire web design process or find a reliable PSD to XHTML conversions. You cannot simply evade the step of PSD to XHTML conversions if you want to launch a website.