If you design your websites in Photoshop or Illustrator then Fireworks CS4 is for you. All you need to do to convert your designs into standards-complaint css is to open your Photoshop or Illustrator files in Fireworks CS4, carve them up using the slice tool and then export to “CSS and Images(.htm)”. You can even do the slicing in Photoshop first if you like and the slices will come over to Fireworks ready to go. This will give you a clean HTML page, its CSS page and all the images sliced and ready to go. Or if you want you can mock up a very quick layout in Fireworks using the rectangle tool, the text tool and a bunch of snippets from the HTML folder in the Common Library and export the CSS from this.

However, would you like to do it the enhanced way?

Without going into too much detail, check out “Creating standards-compliant web designs with Fireworks CS4” on the Adobe Devnet site. This is an article/tutorial by Matt Stow, Fireworks genius.

Matt goes into much more detail on how you can use Fireworks to speed up your web standards complaint CSS work flow dramatically. Matt also provides a link in his tutorial to download the new enhanced CSS export script that he has built to replace the one that comes in Fireworks CS4. And yes, it is greatly enhanced! Download it, install it and read Matt’s tutorial and save yourself hours of CSS heartache.

In the next few weeks I will add a video tutorial here showing some of the enhancements and how quick and painless the work flow is.