Forum Moderators: not2easy
When I started designing sites it was on my own using CSS. Now that I work day to day designing sites for clients, the CSS layouts do not hold up for layout.
I've been having some trouble figuring out the best method for slicing up layout design images in Fireworks and exporting them to HTML. Are there any rules of thumb, tutorials or methods that may make it easier for me to understand the most efficient way of doing this?
Thanks-
If you can bring yourself to do it I'd Forget Fireworks HTML. In the time taken to organise and clean up the generated code every time you export, you might as well have taken the last step and done the layout in CSS-P. SuzyUK has some very nice tutorials [webmasterworld.com] in the CSS forum.
The reason I am anti fireworks-layout (I use FW daily for image graphics) is that it leaves you very little flexibility. Design changes are time consuming and the download of a page created using this method will be twice that of a css based layout.
That said if you combine the exported HTML with Library includes and Templates in Dreamweaver you could streamline it a lot. The first thing I would do with the exported HTML; is clean up the empty cell rows that contain the spacer gifs. I'd not add any rollover buttons in FW - DW code for rollovers is simpler - of course CSS rollovers negates the need for Javascript.
Another rule of thumb. try to keep your slices so they produce as few sections as possible, this wil reduce the amount of table cells - you can best do this by adding guides and auto snapping to them with the slice tool.
There is an option in FW to help you create image files with a simpler naming system ('options' button in export window). This can be handy later as: e.g. "yourgif_r1_c2_f3.gif" is not going to help ;)
