A series of experiments have been earned out to study the effects of materials quality, surface and interfacial modification and photon confinement on standard dye-sensitized solar cells For these studies, both physical and optical characterization of the materials has been performed in detail In addition, DC and AC impedance measurements along with kinetic charge-transport modeling of experimental results have yielded information on how to systematically optimize the cell efficiency The same kinetic model has been used to interpret the results of a series of experiments on interfacial modification studies using fluorine etching in combination with TiCl4 surface treatment By using specially designed photonic crystals to confine the photons in the cells it is shown that the best cell efficiency can be further increased by about 13%