I had a few very elaborate HTML pages to build the other day and just simply didn’t have the time to write clean HTML code. Rather than hack up something that I’d later HATE, I decided to try out a service that I’ve seen reviewed in tons of places. psd2html.com. Their gimmick is, “You design, we XHTML, in 8 hours.” All right smart guys, let’s see how well you do.

I went to the website and clicked on the “Order now” link. I selected the “professional package” and under the advanced options I added “commented”. The total for all three pages, coded in “W3C Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional Table-less CSS markup. Compatible with IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari with W3C Valid Shorthand & Optimized CSS.” with commented markup was $324.00. I filled out my personal information and uploaded my files. Then I entered my credit card info, and hit submit.

Seconds later I got a confirmation email, along with instructions to access my client area of the website.

A couple of minutes after that I got an automated notice saying that a ticket with my project’s details had been entered and accepted by someone.

About 30 minutes later I got my first email from a real person who clarified a couple of points about the job I was requesting.

At this point it was about 12:30 on Wednesday, they say their hours are 10:00am — 6:00pm GMT / 5:00am — 1:00pm EST, so I knew it was getting down to the wire for them, but I got prompt replies, and the final note of the day was that someone would begin working on my project first thing in the morning, and that I could expect markup by 1pm ET on Monday.

At 11:36am I got my markup. I looked it over, and I was initially very impressed. It was clean, it validated, and it was updatable.

Since then we’ve found a couple of flaws that happen when you try to add more content, but they aren’t the fault of PSD2HTML, it’s because our design was very specific. I took the HTML they had produced, made a few minor tweaks to integrate it into our existing stuff, and all was well.

For $324.00, I basically hired a second set of hands, which meant I didn’t have to work over the weekend. Work is happy because the job got done. My boss is happy because $324 is cheaper than the per-hour cost of one of our developers for 24 hours (8 hours x 3 days), and I’m happy because the job got done right.

I’ll definitely be using this service again in the future at work, and I can see myself using them occasionally for my side projects too.