This tutorial will show you a colorful web-layout. Remember that you need to adapt content, buttons and style to fit your needs. This tutorial assumes you know how to deal with and create shapes and apply effects. You can see full size images by clicking on the thumbnails.

1. Create a new 800x600 pixel document with a white background.

Header / Footer:

2. Create a new layer. Take the rounded rectangle tool set to 10 px bevel. Make a box from pixel 50 to 750 with about a 60 pixel height. Right Click / Option-Click and fill it with any color. Place it at the top so the top part of the box is out of the document. Duplicate it and place one at the bottom.

 

3. Apply these effects. Colors are #0057a1 (dark blue) #00aeff (light blue).

 

 

4. Create a new layer. Take the elliptical marquee tool and make a circle in the top half of the header. Take the foreground to transparent gradient with white as the foreground and drag a vertical gradient from the top of the selection to the bottom of the selection. Set the opactiy to about 30%.

5. Place white text on both the header and footer. For the header I placed the name to the left and navigations to the right. I placed 4 navigation options and aligned them to each other.

Left Hand Navigation

6. Create a box from pixel 550 to 750 with a height of 20. Take the filters applied to the header and apply them to this box. Make the base color and the outer glow #de8800.

7. Add text. I used Myriad font in bold.

8. Duplicate this and create a stack for navigation. Leave about a 2 px space between each one. Then create a new layer below these and make a light grey box to encapsulate all the buttons.

9. Take the buttons from before and create a duplicate below. This will be a news box. Create a white box to house the text below the news header. Create a grey box to enclose the news and the white box.

Content Boxes

10. Create a new layer. Make a new box from pixel 50 to 525. Take the effects from the header and apply it to the box. Make the box a solid #008ce4 blue color.

11. Add a title and content for the box.

12. If you want to bring attention to something you can make a star for the box. Take the shape from the default photoshop custom shape preset. Use the layer effects from before but use colors #c07600 (dark orange) to #ff9c00 (light orange) as the gradient.

 

Final Result for content box

 

Final Result:

Discuss the Adobe Photoshop tutorials on the forums. You can find the photoshop files to download there too.