fireworks web design what size do i set it to?

I am designing a template for my web page using fireworks, that i just downloaded, and i was wondering, what size do i set the image to? Should it be one whole image? What are slices and how do they work? Thanks.

Ok, I would say that a site should and cannot ever be one whole image. You have to have text on there. Text is small and downloads quickly. Images on the other hand are made up of description, pixel by pixel (in the main) and so they take much longer to download.

Usually a design is split up around all your text. It is best to think of your design as tables, splitting it up in a sensible way. I believe there was a tutorial written by a member which dealt with slicing images for designs using photoshop and dreamweaver, not fireworks. Having not used fireworks much myself, maybe Gwx03 could come to the rescue??

thanks

Hi,

Fireworks can be used for website design, as I said earlier. Usually, people would use the resolution '760x420 pixels'.

This counts in the browser chrome and is suited for those who use a resolutionof 800x600 and higher ( forty percent of the web use that )

After designing your website in fireworks, you would need to 'slice' them up so that the content is loaded much more quickly.

Fireworks alone is very powerful, and can alone be used for website design (close to totally). Once the site is generated, you just need to do some minor tweeks in notepad ( such as adding a title... etc ).

Due to the complexity of these issues ( there are like 101 things to learn! ), I'll just post some resources... These resources should be very helpful to you, especially Macromedia's support resources and tutorials.

The link to the FREE tutorials and all that is
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/fireworks/

There are a lot of articles there that I didn't even buy or borrow a book to get started. Another good link would be fwzone.net. It hasnot many articles but I found some tutorials and add-ons particularly interesting.

http://www.fwzone.net

You might also check out the following url..
http://www.webforumz.com/links.asp

I am sure that ,over time, more links would be added.

Good luck and happy designing! I hope you will love Fireworks as much as i do ;-)

thanks, yes fireworks seems very complicated.