Hi eddie21leeds,

I deal with this everyday in my job. There are so many ways you could go about making graphics for your site. Personally when I start designing a site as a 2D design, I would begin using Illustrator, this is a piece of software in the Adobe Creative Suite that deals with vector graphics (no pixels). You can create the look and feel of your site very quickly using this.

Once you are happy with a layout you can export this in jpeg format, then opening and using Photoshop to add any photographic elements to you design. Save this a Photoshop PSD file. Open the PSD file in fireworks (which is a great programme and still very much in use). Use fireworks to 'slice' up the elements in your PSD file, which will give you a really high quality low file size compression and then export these slices to Dreamweaver and you should be ready to upload!

This is one way, you can design directly from Fireworks and export, but the other programmes just give you a lot more options at the various stages of creating the type of graphcs you need.

Hope this helps!

mwdesign.