{"id":11189,"date":"2008-05-05T02:11:48","date_gmt":"2008-05-04T23:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/?p=11189"},"modified":"2008-05-05T03:02:28","modified_gmt":"2008-05-05T00:02:28","slug":"mostslicedcom-summary-picking-psd-slicing-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2008\/05\/05\/mostslicedcom-summary-picking-psd-slicing-company\/","title":{"rendered":"MostSliced.com summary &#8211; picking PSD slicing company"},"content":{"rendered":"<!-- google_ad_section_start -->\n<p>Everybody who ever made a web site, knows that design is hard.  Making something outstanding and unique, but at the same time classy and easy to use, requires a professional designer.  Everybody who ever made a web site knows that almost all web design is done in Adobe Photoshop, and that after the actual design is done, there comes an often lengthy and painful stage of slicing the design into its web variant &#8211; a conversion of Adobe Photoshop .PSD file into HTML, CSS, and web optimized images.<\/p>\n<p>Apparently, slicing up a design is not a tough job it all.  It&#8217;s slicing it up properly that makes all the difference.  Anybody who has Adobe Photoshop installed can slice up a design.  Photoshop can do most of the job for you anyway.  But it takes a real professional do it properly.  Don&#8217;t believe me?  Let&#8217;s see.  Have you ever sliced up a design?  If so, feel free to answer the following questions in the comments:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How complex was the design?<\/li>\n<li>How much time did it take you to slice it?<\/li>\n<li>In how many browsers did you check the results?<\/li>\n<li>Did you try to validate the HTML and CSS?<\/li>\n<li>Did you spent any time making the result load faster &#8211; optimize images and code for slow connections?<\/li>\n<li>How about accessibility &#8211; can people with disabilities, people using special software like screen readers, make any sense of the pages that you created?<\/li>\n<li>Was there any SEO (search engine optimization) &#8211; semantic coding &#8211; in your work?<\/li>\n<li>What about the comments in the markup and styles?  Did you left any?  Will other people be able to modify your results easily?<\/li>\n<li>Did you have any considerations regarding technical nuances of the job &#8211; DIVs vs. tables, fixed width vs. fluid, scalable fonts vs fixed sized ones, etc?<\/li>\n<li>Did you have to shape your slicing results into a theme for some CMS software, like WordPress or Drupal?<\/li>\n<li>Have you enjoyed the process?  Would you like to do it again?<\/li>\n<li>How much would you pay not to do it again?  Ever again?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If slicing up designs is not your bread and butter, you&#8217;ll pretty soon arrive to the conclusion that you need someone else to do it.  One of the solutions is to outsource this job to one of the PSD slicing companies.   There are quite a few of them out there &#8211; some are better, some are worse, some new, some old, and some we know nothing about.<\/p>\n<p>But which company to choose?  How to pick the one that will do the magic for you without screwing a thing or two in the process?  Well, of course, there is always fear, uncertainty, and doubt involved, but if we are to put these aside, how can we proceed?<\/p>\n<p>Finding a company to outsource PSD slicing was something I&#8217;ve been asked to do on more than one occasion over the past few weeks.  Finally, I got over my busy schedule and unlimited laziness and came up with something.<\/p>\n<p>There is a web site called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mostsliced.com\/\">MostSliced.com<\/a> .  It is a directory of PSD slicing companies with some brief information about each, user submitted reviews, ratings, and what not.  It&#8217;s not a huge directory &#8211; it only features 20+ companies. It&#8217;s not a very user friendly web site.  But it&#8217;s a good place to start.<\/p>\n<p>Before making any decisions, it&#8217;s good to figure out the requirements for the best match.  Here are the things I had in mind while learning about these companies &#8211; your mileage may vary of course:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How fast can they do the job?<\/li>\n<li>How flexible they are in their technical expertise &#8211; cross-browser compatibility, W3C standards compliance,  SEO,  accessibility,  code commenting, etc?<\/li>\n<li>How many people have  ever used their  services and how many of those got  satisfied?<\/li>\n<li>What were the weak points from those  users who  weren&#8217;t satisfied?<\/li>\n<li>How expensive are they?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I quickly realized that I need to group MostSliced.com listing into a table, add my own rating, and see which companies are doing the best.  So, I fired up my Google Spreadsheet and did exactly that.  I&#8217;ve published <a href=\"http:\/\/spreadsheets.google.com\/pub?key=pREF5oKjWoPQjNFcSPHq1Lg\">the table for  anyone to see<\/a>, but if for some reason you can&#8217;t access it, feel free to use an image below (click it for a larger version).<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/05\/mostsliced_com_summary.png?ssl=1\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"11190\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2008\/05\/05\/mostslicedcom-summary-picking-psd-slicing-company\/mostsliced_com_summary\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/05\/mostsliced_com_summary.png?fit=1002%2C414&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"1002,414\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"MostSliced.com summary\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/05\/mostsliced_com_summary.png?fit=660%2C273&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-11190 aligncenter\" title=\"MostSliced.com summary\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/05\/mostsliced_com_summary-300x123.png?resize=300%2C123&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"123\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/05\/mostsliced_com_summary.png?resize=300%2C123&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/05\/mostsliced_com_summary.png?w=1002&amp;ssl=1 1002w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Things that you see in that table are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Company name.<\/li>\n<li>Company URL.<\/li>\n<li>Price. This is a price in US Dollars for the first page, as reported by MostSliced.com .<\/li>\n<li>Time.  This is the time in days that the company will need to slice up your design.<\/li>\n<li>Reviews.  This is the number of reviews for this company posted at MostSliced.com for the moment of creating the table.<\/li>\n<li>Reviews rating.  This the average rating of the company given by all reviews at MostSliced.com.<\/li>\n<li>Combined rating.  This is the rating that I came up with.  It is calculated like so: combined rating = ((Reviews \/ 2) * (Reviews rating \/ 10) \/ (Price * Time)) * 1000.  The idea is the following:  half of the ratings are submitted by the companies themselves or by their very biased users.  So we&#8217;ll just use the other half. We&#8217;ll decrease the review rating range from between 0 and 10 to between 0 and 1.  Then we&#8217;ll multiple this rating by the number of the reviews the company has. The result of this multiplication we&#8217;ll divide by a product of time and price.  The slower they are, or the more expensive, the lower their rating will be.  The more reviews they have, and the more positive their reviews are, the higher their rating goes.  And just to make the rating numbers into some sensible numbers, multiply the result by 1,000.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>To make things a little bit easier to digest, I added some colors.  White and gray backgrounds are just for stripes, to make it easier to read.  The best values for each column are highlighted in green.  The worst values are highlighted in red.  The values in between are highlighted in yellow.  The final table is sorted by the Combined Rating, so that the best companies to choose from are at the top.  According to these findings, the top three best companies to give our trust to are:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.xhtmlmaster.com\">xHTML Master<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.psdslicing.com\">PSD Slicing<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/frontenders.com\">Frontenders<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>As I said, your mileage may vary.  Things that you should keep in mind are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There are more companies out there than those that are listed in MostSliced.com .<\/li>\n<li>There are other factors to take into consideration which weren&#8217;t even mentioned here &#8211; for example, the timezone the company is in, languages they can communicate with, payment conditions, etc.<\/li>\n<li>I am pretty bad at anything that needs any calculations. Seriously.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I will most likely continue with the research in this area.  Or maybe I will just go ahead and try a few of them out.  But in either case, if you have any suggestions or ideas in these matters, please let me know.<\/p>\n<!-- google_ad_section_end -->\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<!-- google_ad_section_start -->\n<p>Everybody who ever made a web site, knows that design is hard. Making something outstanding and unique, but at the same time classy and easy to use, requires a professional designer. Everybody who ever made a web site knows that almost all web design is done in Adobe Photoshop, and that after the actual design &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2008\/05\/05\/mostslicedcom-summary-picking-psd-slicing-company\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">MostSliced.com summary &#8211; picking PSD slicing company<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<!-- google_ad_section_end -->\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1,1334],"tags":[1517,1190,572,513,1041,1157],"keyring_services":[],"class_list":["post-11189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-web-work","tag-css","tag-html","tag-reviews","tag-services","tag-statistics","tag-web-design"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11197,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2008\/05\/14\/psd-slicing-service-recommendation\/","url_meta":{"origin":11189,"position":0},"title":"PSD slicing service recommendation","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"May 14, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"This is a follow-up to my recent post \"MostSliced.com summary - picking PSD slicing company\". Once the choices for the PSD slicing service were established, I did the next step - actual order.\u00a0 I started from the top of my list, which happened to be xHTML Master.\u00a0 I sent them\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":28115,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2017\/10\/18\/designevo-free-online-logo-maker\/","url_meta":{"origin":11189,"position":1},"title":"DesignEvo &#8211; free online logo maker","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"October 18, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"There is a whole lot of online image editors.\u00a0 Some are very simple and only allow one to crop or rotate and image.\u00a0 Others are super powerful, almost replacing all of the Adobe PhotoShop functionality.\u00a0 There are also a few which are in between and were built for a very\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/DesignEvo-Qobo.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9565,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2005\/10\/12\/daily-del-icio-us-bookmarks\/","url_meta":{"origin":11189,"position":2},"title":"Daily del.icio.us bookmarks","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"October 12, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Let's start with a few Google-related links: \"google current\" - Google Video -- 3 minute video news every 30 minutes Tagged as: google news tv video gHacks.net -- Search Engine Secrets revealed Tagged as: blog google howto internet search tips tools tricks web GmailTime.com -- Free Gmail inviter Tagged as:\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":22809,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2014\/11\/06\/brackets-a-modern-open-source-text-editor-that-understands-web-design\/","url_meta":{"origin":11189,"position":3},"title":"Brackets &#8211; a modern, open source text editor that understands web design","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"November 6, 2014","format":"link","excerpt":"Brackets - a modern, open source text editor that understands web design. By Adobe.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"brackets","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/brackets-500x161.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":28444,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2018\/03\/22\/lesser-known-css-quirks-advanced-tips\/","url_meta":{"origin":11189,"position":4},"title":"Lesser known CSS quirks &#038; advanced tips","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"March 22, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Lesser known CSS quirks & advanced tips\" is a collection of some really weird CSS features and behaviors.\u00a0 These are good to know, as sometimes they can shed some light on strange results or help with implementation of a particular design feature, where no other options are applicable.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/css-is-awesome-500x389.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":28880,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2018\/10\/23\/having-fun-with-link-hover-effects\/","url_meta":{"origin":11189,"position":5},"title":"Having fun with link hover effects","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"October 23, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Any web developer knows how to apply CSS rules to style web page elements.\u00a0 Including links.\u00a0 Including hover effects (on mouse over).\u00a0 But I think most have never went far enough to explore the limits of this styling.\u00a0 \"Having fun with link hover effects\" goes exactly there, with some really\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/css-500x278.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11189"},{"taxonomy":"keyring_services","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/keyring_services?post=11189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}