As the winter holidays are quickly approaching, we selected for you the best dedicated web design articles inspired by the celebrations.

• 20+ Creative Christmas Cards for Inspiration
• Create a Holiday Card Using Digital Painting Techniques
• Amazing Holiday Brushes from BrushLovers
• How to Create CSS3 Christmas Tree Ornaments
• Awesome Graphic Design Resources for Christmas
• 10 Beautiful Christmas Photoshop Patterns Packs

Happy Holidays!

PSD to HTML services are increasingly in demand and have proven to be of great benefit to web designers who want to reduce turnaround time, deliver professional code, and produce high quality websites.

After investigating the available PSD to HTML providers on the market and selecting one, the next step for a web designer should be to focus on how to achieve the optimum level of service, quality and efficiency out of the collaboration.

At CodeMyIMAGE, we manage numerous clients and development projects every day, and our focus is to consistently do our part to deliver the most services in support of the collaboration with designers. Having dealt with very different technical requests, we found it necessary to define some best practices guidelines.

We hope that you will find these to be useful tips for you as you move forward with your PSD to HTML outsourcing opportunity:

Communicate clearly your expectations in terms of creative and technical design. As a web designer, you will want your design to keep its essence, so make sure you understand any potential technical limitations and you convey, as accurately as possible, your desired results.

1. If you are pressed by your own deadlines, then make sure the turnaround time committed to by your PSD to HTML provider meets your requirements. Two-way communication during every step of the development process with your provider is a necessity, in order to make improvements and stay efficient.
2. Provide feedback to your markup provider – check the final XHTML/CSS markup and how it matches your design concept.  Be sure and check for any conversion peculiarities and deliver feedback quickly to insure that any edits or fixes can be completed while still maintaining your schedule.
3. Check if your PSD to HTML provider offers further services that might suit your needs! Decide if it makes sense for the website to be integrated onto a CMS platform or if you want to make it compatible with mobile as well.  See if your provider can provide and integrate these services. It will save you time and you will build an even stronger collaboration.

Outsourcing PSD to HTML services is definitely a smart move with many advantages for web designers. And it should be developed using a process built on a solid foundation of communication and technical expectations of the design.

As we are getting closer to the end of the year, it is time to review what has happened in the areas of web design and development in the year that is about to pass.

We chose the best tutorials and resources centralizing web design and web development essential tools in 2010. Enjoy!

• Massive Collection of Best Photoshop Tutorials from 2010
• Top 10 Best Flash Websites of 2010
• Web Design Photoshop Layout Tutorials From 2010
• Hits and misses in software development in 2010

Semantic coding is a type of code that is both descriptive and representative and used by developers with the main purpose of enabling search engines to read their web pages and improve their rank. More recently, its role has been credited with improving the overall organization of the World Wide Web environment.

In the highly competitive world of the web, every developer should focus on quality coding and have a sound understanding of the importance of semantic coding. The result of this will be improved search engine optimization, accessibility, and maintenance over the long term.

At CodeMyIMAGE, our focus is to provide only semantic, hand coded, cross-browser compatible and W3C compliant markup. We believe this approach has enabled many of our clients to deliver more accessible, easy to maintain, and SEO optimized websites.

If you are looking for more arguments in support of semantic coding, we will further share some guiding principles we embrace when developing a website:

1. Think of semantic code as aesthetic code that is attractive for both users and search engines! SEO friendly semantic code will return the best search engine rankings for your website.
2. In the long run, semantic code is easier to maintain by developers and ensures that your markup remains valid and easy to manage.
3. Consider code separation as a best practice! By including semantic code in your HTML and CSS, and applied to the design and style, you will ultimately improve your web pages’ maintainability, look and feel.
4. If you decide to outsource your coding to a PSD to HTML provider, make sure you are provided with SEO optimized markup. We think you will find it a worthwhile investment for all the reasons previously mentioned.

Semantic coding is in many ways superior and adds value to your website in terms of accessibility and search engine optimization. We think quality coding is a required step in order to move the web experience to a more meaningful semantic level.

In this week’s article roundup, we have found interesting resources for everyone involved in the areas of web design web development. Enjoy!

• 20 Plugin Replacing Tutorials, Tips, Snippets and Solutions for WordPress
• DepositPhoto Illustration, 3D, Photography and Vector Roundup
• 50 Years of Typography in Album Covers
• Generative Artwork with HTML5