When it comes to choosing a tool for designing websites, web design professionals have a lot of options. However, a majority of them prefer using Photoshop, Adobe's powerhouse designing app. This app is also useful for making web page backgrounds and basic layouts. Irrespective of their skill set and backgrounds, designers prefer using Photoshop over other tools for website design and image optimizing.

Designing an elegant and professional looking website is often a matter of maintaining a balance between aesthetic need and practicality. Using excess of graphics and visual effects can mar a website's appeal while minimalism in design often succeeds in striking a chord with viewers. However, web and graphic design professionals need to know right ways to use Photoshop's various tools for lending websites a touch of finesse and aesthetic appeal.

• It goes without saying that Photoshop is such a powerful and versatile design tool that designers can use many of its tools for performing same tasks with images. In web design, using space effectively is a prime requirement. Web design professionals need to use text, images and white space in web pages in such a way that no element overshadows others and there is symmetry. Professional web designers believe in placing objects in web pages including images with pixel perfect precision. For this purpose, Photoshop's Guides and Grids come in handy. This app also lets users define custom guides for each file. Smart Guides can also be used in this context by design professionals.
• It is not necessary to resort to 3D for creating an appealing website. Designers with a creative bent of mind and resources can create illusion of depth in web pages by using light and shadow effectively. Fortunately, Photoshop comes with a set of lighting effects and precise shadow adjustment features that let users adjust lighting in images the way they want. Features like Layer Mask and Brush tools can also be used in myriads of ways for creating depth in images using Photoshop.
• For creating textured background in web pages, Photoshop's gradient tool is really useful. It lets users apply gradients and create new ones with unlimited colour combination, literally.   This tool can also be used for creating metallic textures and buttons in web pages. Some designers use gradients to create pages with a surface resembling paper and stone.
• It is important to use headings and sub headings in web pages with clearly demarcated edges. This makes those text headings eye catching and help them in standing out against page background well. Photoshop's Stroke layer effect is useful in this context.
• Photoshop does offers lots of options for adding special effects to texts. Web designers can convert text headings to Smart Object for applying myriads of effects. Text can also be rasterized but that is a practice professional designers usually avoid. "Convert to Smart Object" feature in Photoshop is used for retaining text as editable while allowing users to apply numerous effects on them. This is practical since a designer may need to alter text content later.