I just did a quick advertisement mini-site for Planet Pinoy. Their 6th anniversary is coming up, and they are throwing a big concert at the Solano County Fairgrounds in Vallejo. It’s on Sunday, 16 October 2005, at 6 pm. Check it out..

http://www.eplanetpinoy.com/opm/

On the technical side, they wanted to use the poster art on the front page with links under various areas. I requested the original version in Photoshop, so I could pull layers apart. This was most useful for the rest of the site, including the artist feature pages and even the background, which is an endless tile pulled from part of the poster (with a little rubber stamp help).

I went around finishing up all of the sub-pages and finally came back to home. There was no real way to use the same elements in a new layout, while keeping the same feel and energy. So I just decided to start slicing into it. I’ve only ever used the slicing tools in Adobe ImageReady. But I found that they seem to be up to par in Photoshop CS now. The whole thing came together more quickly than I’d anticipated. The only tedious part being on the Save For Web window, where I needed to click each slice, setting color tables and transparency one by one. I don’t like doing things like that without saving incrementally.

There ended up being over 30 slices. But it is color-optimized, and loads instantly on broadband. I think the entire collection of images is still under 140 KB. Amazingly, the HTML output didn’t require any adjustment, aside from placing it inside the home page layout and editing one link to spawn a new window.

After doing so many template-based sites, generated on the fly by Perl, this was a fun trip back to basic HTML hand-coded in BBEdit. I wonder how much time Dreamweaver would have saved me? Maybe next time.