Using fireworks and DW together

**Dan Bowley** · 03-17-2005, 03:28 PM

I've just designed a site I'm very happy with - have put it on this domain for the time being- www.thewinelist.co.uk

I did the pages in fireworks and put them into dreamweaver. Problem is the file for each page is 970kb and takes 10 seconds to load in. Where did I go wrong? I found it so much easier to design a whole page in Fireworks like a picture. Do I really have to cut it up and deal with multiple tables and alignment in Dreamweaver? Would appreciate your comments/ideas

**angele803** · 03-17-2005, 04:01 PM

I would reccommend slicing your layout. It really isnt that hard once you get going. Sometimes it makes managing your content easier. But if you want to find out about how slicing affects the load time and all that, check out this site.
http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/web...a/whyslice.htm

**recedo** · 03-17-2005, 04:17 PM

The thing is, if you sliced it up you would be able to have the text as text instead of an image, which, apart from reducing loading times, would make your site more search engine friendly.

**Dan Bowley** · 03-18-2005, 04:51 AM

Right! I'm going to start slicing, it makes too much sense - thanks for your replies

**Dan Bowley** · 03-18-2005, 07:35 AM

Just one question though - I can anti-alaise text in fireworks but how do I do it in Dreamweaver? Can I not post text at the bottom of the site to help search engine identification?

**davemies** · 03-18-2005, 08:12 AM

plain text in dreamweaver relies on the user's system antialiasing - the same as any other text displayed in browsers/software

**Dan Bowley** · 09:12 AM

So how do professional sites keep their fonts consistent to all viewers and still get seen by search engines?

**Kaiman** · 03-18-2005, 03:41 PM

Just want to mention that when you slice up your images in Fireworks and import them into Dreamweaver to make sure to export them as Gifs and JPGs, not PNG files (which is Fireworks default file type) because older browsers don't know what to do with PNGs and they are just way too big even when optimized.

Kaiman

Storm King Design

**Minaki** · 03-19-2005, 08:58 AM

It depends how 'old' is 'old'. Like, do you really still need to cater for the 0.0001% of people still using IE4? IE5 will display PNGs. The only issue you will have is transparency. IE won't handle alpha transparency on PNGs just like that. You can however use one of IEs CSS Filters (AlphaImageLoader) to get around this. There is a script called Sleight which does this for you to some extent. I use PNGs extensively in my new site. I've also never had a problem with file sizes...

**Kaiman** · 03-22-2005, 04:17 PM

Good point Minaki about the transparency issue. This seems like another reason to export files as GIF's as transparency isn't an issue and GIF's can be both transparent or not, depending on your preference. Also older Netscape browsers don't support PNGs either.

Kaiman

Storm King Design