Coding something generally speaking requires writing actual code. Not opening up photoshop and feeding a PSD into a plugin, then selling the badly written, slow to load, virtually impossible to SEO and nightmare edit code.
The reason I can tell you this, is because the link to a "preview of your work" (quoted below) very clearly shows this.
1. This page is automatically generated by a photoshop plugin, which is free. you can get it
here
2. The reason that this plugin (or others of it's kind) are not widely used by people who actually have a clue what they are doing, is because the code that is output by them really sucks. Rather than using fast loading and clean css styles, with the html code nicely organised and physically possible to edit, they make divide the PSD file into lots of images and just display them next to eachother like a mosaic to create a page.
This is bad for a few reasons:
- If you ever want to edit something on that page, it makes it virtually impossible to do without ruining the overall look of the page, because it moves other little images around and everything gets out of place.
- layouts are a fixed size. Meaning even if someone with a low resolution screen comes to your website, the layout will remain the same size. Also this means there is a limited amount of height you can fill the page with, so that limits your content.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is dead. Search engines find your page based on a few things: keywords in the content, meta keywords, and the names of your html's divs and classes. With one of these websites, alot of text is converted to images, which makes it impossible for a search engine to see it, also, the divs and classes are numbered rather than given meaningful names e.g. "object34", this also makes editing anything in the html an absolute nightmare.
3. The XHTML/CSS is not valid. The preview of your work that you gave as an example's html is not valid.
4. You claimed it is an example of "IE6 Browser support". Really? because I thought that someone who knows what this term
means would know that IE6 doesn't support transparent PNGs. The page looks absolutely nasty in alot of browsers. IE6 is one of them (look below for screenshots).
5. The price: There is a reason its so cheap. A real developer will charge anything between $50 and $200 to slice and code a PSD into a HTML/CSS page. There is a reason for this, which is that they won't be using a dodgy plugin, and the code you receive will work correctly, and will be of a high standard.
Some screenshots of this page in various browsers (he claims cross browser support, and IE6 support)
This is the benchmark, Safari. It displays it perfectly, use this for reference. This is what it should look like.
http://i511.photobucket.com/albums/s.../benchmark.png
Now this is the page in IE6
http://i511.photobucket.com/albums/s...elex06/ie6.jpg
The page in FireFox 2
http://i511.photobucket.com/albums/s...elex06/ff2.jpg
The page in the latest version of FireFox (note the errors in text placement, mainly due to the fixed nature of the layout)
http://i511.photobucket.com/albums/s...6/fflatest.png
The page in FireFox 4 beta (virtually the same as current FF)
http://i511.photobucket.com/albums/s...elex06/ff4.png
Well this ends my little rant. I'm
not saying do not use this service, but what I am saying is that you'll get what you pay for, and some of the things this guy is claiming are not true.
Zen
