Most web Designers now a days use expensive programs like Adobe Dreamweaver or Adobe Fireworks to create their web sites. Well these programs have a lot of functionality but they also have heavy price tag as well. As a starting out web designer I did not have access to programs like this until I had designed a couple sites. So I needed a way I could create my Web Designs with what I had when I started and that was a Laptop with Windows XP, an internet connection, and the willingness to learn. What I needed was a way I could layout the way I wanted my web page to look and then extract parts of the images for my web site.

Adobe has this neat little tool called the slice tool that you use to cut up your image so it will work in a web page. What I found was MS Paint is able to do this too, not as easily as Photoshop does it but it is still doable. So all you will need to start creating quality web pages, is Notepad, MS Paint, and Windows Calculator. So we will now open up MS Paint and go to "Image" and select "Attributes" or press Ctrl+E and change your size to 800x600 or what ever size you want your web page to be. Now go nuts and create a main background color using the paint can tool and create your banner, your image links down the side or at the top. Basically make this image look exactly how you want your web page to look, but do not add the content into the web page.

Now that you have your design done in MS Paint we will extract the images so that we can use them. The easiest way of doing this is to use the square select tool on the top right of your tool bar. Select this tool and then use it to select your first box which will be your first image. Once you have your image selected you are going to click "Edit" then "Copy" or do Ctrl+C. Next open up another instance of MS Paint and click "Edit" then "Paste" or Ctrl+V so our selection is now its own image. Make sure you grab the lower right box of the image and resize the canvas so there is now extra white showing around our image. Now save this image as something you will remember. We will now do this for everyone of the logical areas on our image, like each link will be its own image, any extra space will be an image, the entire area where you plane to put your content will be its own image.

Now that we have all of our images it's time to put them together in to our web page. This can simply be done using tables and having a little bit of patients to make sure everything is sized correctly. You will first create a table that is going to be 800 in width, since that was the width of the original image we create. If you had a larger width in the original image you create make sure that your table will reflect that image. Next we want to make sure that border="0", cellpadding="0", and cellspacing="0" because we want everything to touch right up against each other. All of our images will be placed in the table accordingly so that we recreate the original image. When you create your links with images make sure that in the img tag you specify border="0" so you don't get a blue border around the image.

Next is how we handle the content area of your web site and we have two ways we can do this. The first way is to take the image that we cut out and use that as our background for the td tag that will have our content in it. This way is a little easier but does increase the load time of the web page. The other way only works if your background for your content section is a solid color. Go back to MS Paint with the original image loaded on the screen and select the little toolbar button that looks like an eye dropper and click on the area of the image that will be your content. Doing this places that color into the paint program where we can look at it and edit it. Click on "Colors" then "Edit Colors..." and a window will open up where you click on "Define Custom Colors >>". This will open a little side window where you can see the amount of Red, Green, and Blue being used. Copy these numbers down and click cancel on the "Edit Colors" window. Now open up your calculator and click "View" then "Scientific" so that you get all of the extra options with your calculator. To get the color we our web page we need to convert the decimal number we got from paint into HEX. So lets take the first number we wrote down and type it into our calculator and then click the radio button that says HEX. We now have the HEX equivalent of our decimal number. So we need to do this for all three numbers we copied down, example we have Red 56 Green 153 and Blue 23 once we convert these to HEX they are Red 38 Green 99 and Blue 17. So our code to set the background in our tr tag will be "#389917".

So as you can probably see using MS Paint is a little more time consuming than using Photoshop to create your web pages. But it will cost you nothing more than a little bit of time until you can create enough web sites that you can purchase Photoshop or Fireworks. I hope you enjoyed this article and found it to be informative.