PNG to XHTML in One Hour or Your Money Back

October 15, 2008 8:59 AM

Has anyone used any of the many PSD to XTML and CSS services out there? Were you happy? Were you sad? Did you employ child labour?

I accidentally dropped a project and the MeFite I work with for CSS and XHTML is all booked up on another gig. I urgently need someone to dish out XHTML and CSS from a page mock-up because I am up to my ears at the moment.

I am considering using one of the many sites offering this service on a price-per-page basis. If you've ever used any of these services, can you tell me which one, what you paid, and how happy you were with the output? Similarly if you have a horror story, I'm equally interested in cautionary tales.

(And yes, this is a one-off, and no, I'm not going to drop the lovely mefi I work with in favour of a nameless faceless offshore monolith. I'm just in a jam.)

posted by DarlingBri to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I've used the original PSDtoHTML folks once or twice and been very pleased with the results. Yes, there was more back and forth than I had anticipated - things not working during integration of the design - but they were great about turning around fixes within 24 hours and ultimately I had something I was very happy with.
posted by twiki at 9:03 AM on October 15, 2008

Seconding PSD2HTML. I've usually had to go at least one round of revisions as well. But have always been satisfied with the final results.
posted by safetyfork at 10:06 AM on October 15, 2008

I used PSD2HTML and wasn't very impressed, they took much longer than the estimate - 5 days rather than 8 hours as promised. They also tried to charge a considerable amount extra for form styling when all that was required was a background image on a text input. I paid the $39 extra for SEO optimisation of the layout but the only evidence of that was a div with an id of 'seo' that contained a simple link to the homepage with the name of the site as the link text.

I found the coding to be excessive, lots of unnecessary wrappers, it was definitely a lower quality than I would have done myself and not really that cheap. The only reason I outsourced this layout to them was it was more cost effective on a fiddly layout (they charge per page not based on complexity)
posted by missmagenta at 10:24 AM on October 15, 2008

Give it to me and I can make it into a class project for my students. Results will vary, and it will take a while, but you'll get 14 different takes on it :)
posted by joelf at 11:24 AM on October 15, 2008

Thank you for the PSDtoHTML feedback. I appreciate it; that all sounds like about what I expected.

I don't have time for back and forth across time zones or for someone to get it wrong, but luckily another MeFite has come to my rescue in exchange for me standing up and yelling "GO DAVE!" every Wednesday at 1 PM - and a very reasonable amount of cold hard cash.

God knows I've done weirder swaps on Craigslist, so hey, GO DAVE!
posted by DarlingBri at 1:24 PM on October 15, 2008

: )
posted by scabrous at 7:31 PM on October 15, 2008