You need your company's website to look good. What that might constitute does, of course, depend upon what impression you intend to convey, what manner of goods or services your business provides,and how you need potential and existing customers to see your organisation.

However you construct the appearance of your site, it must be done with style and a consistent professional lustre. In an online world where brand loyalty is at best unreliable, and where the average time spent on any one page is measured in seconds, the visual appearance of your company has never been more important.

The market leading software for designing websites is Adobe Dreamweaver, and one of the great advantages that Dreamweaver offers is complete compatibility with Adobe Photoshop. Images can be transferred at the touch of a button from Photoshop to Dreamweaver, or back again for further editing; using both programs in tandem gives you complete control and the power to ensure that the appearance of your site is as attractive as can be. But if Dreamweaver helps you to design the most professional and effective websites, what does Photoshop bring to the party?

Engaging images

Whatever kind of pictures your site requires, you can rely on Photoshop to give you the tools to produce the perfect look. For example: a company that sells and installs kitchens needs to have many examples of their work on the site. With Photoshop, it's easy to quickly improve the quality and attractiveness of the pictures they take of their work. A huge range of tools give you control over every aspect of the images, making the perfect look simply and rapidly attainable. The company's kitchens can be given a softer focus, brighter colours, a spotless finish - anything that would make them more striking and appealing.

The software also provides a range of predefined actions (and the option to make your own), allowing the user to apply the same techniques to any number of images with a single click. Using Actions can play a major role in the styling of a website's graphics, as it provides consistency and uniformity of design. For the aforementioned kitchen designer, this approach gives the site an artfulness that can only put the company into the most positive light; it also makes it easy for any company to ensure that branding and company colours are maintained throughout the site.

When Photoshop is being used in conjunction with Dreamweaver, images can be moved straight from one program to the other, and put to use in a variety of ways. Apart from simply placing the picture within a page, it's easy to use images as a transparent background to a page, or as links, or to create a slideshow of the pictures. Whatever kind of images you need, for whatever purpose, Photoshop and Dreamweaver give you total control without complexity, nor the need for any existing expertise or coding knowledge.

Attractive details

Not all the graphics in your website need come from photographs, however. There are other elements in the page that can be enhanced by using Photoshop and Dreamweaver together. For many websites, navigation is done through buttons, rather than text links, as these are usually more stylish, and can better reflect the company's brand identity.

Any image can be used as a button, and Photoshop makes it easy to design a button that's both clearly understandable and adheres to the consistent style of your site - and these can be simply slotted into your page and connected to a link within Dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver also allows you to leave space at the top or side of the page for a banner. Although many sites use this space for an advertisement created by an outside agency, it's also common - and frequently effective - to create banners that encourage visitors either to make use of services you offer, a helpline perhaps or a low-cost shipping deal, or to visit other parts of the website. These banners can also be constructed quickly in Photoshop, with whatever text or images are needed, and dropped directly into the Dreamweaver page.

Using Photoshop can transform and greatly enhance your experience with Dreamweaver, and consequently can markedly improve the appearance and effectiveness of your website. It's worth considering a training course to get the very most out of these versatile and powerful tools, in order that you or your staff can ensure that the site continues to have the ideal visual appeal. With Photoshop and Dreamweaver, you can have your site looking its best in no time.