I have a 'splash page' for my new web site that I want to do as a fixed design. I want to control exactly how that single page will look, because the way I am designing it, if the design shifts around, it just won't work.

See, I'm going to do a design that almost looks like a mirror or picture frame with three panels of broken glass in it, the cracks zigging and zagging this way and that. In most ways of building a site, it would be very hard to make things that were added on top of the background be in the right places, especially when resized in different browsers and the like.

So I am thinking the splash page is going to be created as a single graphic image, then broken into rows and columns, like large graphics used to be done frequently before modem speeds were constantly increasing.

Having never done work like this before, I have three main questions.

1) What size would you all recommend making the splash page, so it would show up nicely on most browsers at most resolutions. (ie should I size for 600 x 800, or is that an infrequent enough size now that I could take a step up to 768 x 1028 or whatever the next step usually is ... and at that overall size, what exact size (in pixels) should I make my splash page to fit that on the different browsers (since most probably have different dimensions that they actually use to display the pages.))

2) My current thought is to set up the splash page in a table (8 x 6 cells or something along those lines), with the image portions stuck into those cells with no borders or buffers or anything, allowing me to recreate the picture, and link each individual image portion to the proper interior page it would represent. (Avoid having to learn about image maps and setting one up). Positives or negatives on this? Have image maps become something simple enough these days, especially with products like Dreamweaver to assist, that I should just take the time to figure it out, or should the table idea work just fine?

3) On larger screens, what is the simplest way to make my splash screen center on the screen, surrounded by a black field, nice and neat.

Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.

See this link for CSS Control http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/creating/fixedwidthlayout.html

  In Dreamweaver, if Behaviors Panel is not open go to Window > Behaviors (Shift + F3) to open it. Click on the plus (+) sign and choose Open Browser Window.