In need of some assistance involving ImageReady

I don't really need a tutorial on it or anything, but what's "slicing" do?

When I made my site design, the background image was loading pretty slow, even for cable connection. So I thought I'd break up the image in the seperate pieces, then just place them together.

That's when I thought of the "slicing". Can someone tell me what that is, and how to chop it up into seperate pieces?

Sorry, but I haven't used ImageReady before, so I don't know these things. :o

Sounds like you need a tutorial...... Well if you don't feel like reading the help files that come with the program of which you speak.....

Basically the easiest way is to layout a grid by dragging out ruler guides. Like make a box around each button on a navbar for example. Then just click on the slices menu, and click "Create Slices From Guides". Now it turns all of those little squares you made into slices. You can use the Slice Selection tool to click on each one and use different compression settings. (GIF, JPEG, and different compression ratios of each) Then just click on File > Save Optimized as, and play with the settings there. You can either have Imageready creat the table code for you, or just save the images alone. You can also define how all of the output files will be named. Then when you tell it what directory to save in, all of the little squares will be saved as individual images in that directory, and it will save you about 3 hours of cropping and copy pasting.