Critical Skills

You'll learn critical skills for building, slicing, and optimizing navigation graphics from the first two projects in this chapter. You'll use these skills to complete many of the projects in this book and over and over in your personal Web work.

In the first project, Building a Navigation Bar, you learn how to put together a set of matching buttons for a navigation bar, taking advantage of time-saving construction techniques and special Web-oriented features in ImageReady. The emphasis here is on efficiency— using one button as a template for an entire bar of matching buttons. The second project, Slicing and Optimizing a Navigation Bar, simplifies the seemingly complex tasks of slicing and optimizing individual components of a navigation bar. We explain how and why to slice, and we show you how to optimize slices in GIF and JPEG formats for fast download and display on the Web. The third project, Transparent Buttons, demonstrates how to surround navigation buttons with transparency to allow your Web page background to show through.

In this tutorial:

1. Creating Stylish, User-Friendly Navigation
2. Critical Skills
3. Rollovers
4. Image Maps 
5. Starting New File for Web 
6. Building Navigation Bar 
7. JPEG Optimization Settings 
8. GIF Optimization Settings
9. Slicing and Optimizing Navigation Bar
10. Slice Options
11. Transparent Buttons 
12. Rollover Navigation 
13. Pointers and Remote Rollovers 
14. Image Map Navigation