Busy — Thu, 31 Oct 2002 22:00:00 +0000

Another thing to watch out for is your tables, don't make one big table, use seperate tables
one for the banner section, one for the content section
and even one for the bottom (footer) section, this makes it load faster and gives viewers something to look at (the banner section) while the rest of the page displays.

mbmicro — Thu, 31 Oct 2002 21:11:08 +0000

Thanks Megan.

I really appreciate your help and i can see that by moving to Imageready i have loads of options for tags, CSS if i want too. GREAT. I might use CSS for the layout but not at first. I will evetially in time after launching my business. I have got to say it is much better than the template i am using right now for my Watercooling shop.....here --> http://www.chill-tek.com

Thanks again for your help.

Regards

Mark

Megan — Thu, 31 Oct 2002 19:11:27 +0000

I think that something like this will be great for a store - just reduce some of the extra images like I mentioned before. I'm not really sure which template would be best - it's really up to you. I would probably go for something more traditional looking, like the two blue on white ones on the right side of the page. Or maybe the one in the bottom left corner with the water droplets would be the right one to go with. That one looks pretty easy to work with, and you could always replace those three rectangular picture with photos of your own products. All of these templates are nice so it's hard to pick one for you - just go with what you like.

Slicing in Photoshop is really pretty easy. Actually, you'll probably want to switch to Image Ready for this because it's got a few extra slicing tools. All you do is first move in some guides to help you outline where your slices are going to be (this will make sure that your slices are exactly right). Then use the slice tool to draw your slices in - this should snap to the guides you've created which will help to make them line-up properly. Then make sure the slice palette is on top and use the slice select tool to go select the slices and rename them in the slices palette. You can also decide if you even want to use an image for that part of the page - for sections that you will do with HTML and text, you can set to "no image" in the slices palette. You should also make sure that each image slice has the right optimization settings applied to it. You can also ad rollovers to a slice using the rollover palette but I won't get into that now. The last step is to just "save optimized as" which will save an html file with the images in the directory you select.

I think the reason why some sites use such bad templates is because they just don't know any better - they just go with what seems to be readily available and cheap.

mbmicro — Thu, 31 Oct 2002 15:15:41 +0000

Thanks for the reply.

The files are not drawn up into slices so i will need to slice each image seperately like buttons, top logo, sidelinks, footer etc. I only use Photoshop 7 and dont have or want to really use PSP as i have become familiar with most of Photoshop 7 apart from creating webpages with the slice tool. I have sliced a basic image before into buttons. It was a top nav bar into 6 buttons but that was it so i may find the whole template slicing pretty hard to grasp. So which template is your favorite out of the bunch on the site. Also do you think that they are a little too nice for an ecommerce store. Many stores i see are really basic and some i have seen are only using a standard Actinic Catalog templates with no mods. I think the Actinic store templates look pretty amateurish and definately not professional so why do these people use them? So what's your opinion on the templates? Your favorite layout or colours? Let me know and thanks for the help so far. Much appreciated

Megan — Thu, 31 Oct 2002 15:02:39 +0000

It depends on how the PSD file is set-up. If they already have the slices drawn it it will be as simple as "save for web" or "save optimized" in Image Ready.

As for the download speed, it might not be a huge problem if you set the pages up right - you could always eliminate some of the un-necessary graphic bits. I was looking at this one for example. You could easily take out that big "Global Communications" graphic to save on download speeds. You could also replace the 3D headers in the body of the page with html background colours, and the same can be said of the left side navgiation bar. That will save you a lot of download time.

I haven't had a chance to thoroughly examine the templates available here, so there are probably others that could be modified this way as well.

London_Dog — Thu, 31 Oct 2002 14:14:42 +0000

I think this will only be a problem for 56k users. It loaded pretty quickly in my browser and im on a semi broadband company network.
If you did want to lower the file size a bit you can use the paint shop pro jpeg optimizer which can compress the file with only a slight loss of quality.

as for the slicing is it not as simple as just opening it and then saving it as something else? Im not sure but i wouldnt have thought that would have been to hard.