I am designing a website and am planning on slicing up my template in Fireworks and then exporting it to Dreamweaver. When this is done it does of course go into a table. I have a title and nav bar with a left section to the right of a main content section, with a footer at the bottom.
I was wondering if it is possible to make it so that if the main content section expands (with for example a blog), I can make the footer move down and the left content section to stay where it is (using slices)?
I realize this is a 2012 question, however even in June of 2012 this applied.....
No one should probably be slicing layouts anymore.
With the improvements in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and PNG32 support there's little need for slicing anything. And tables should never be used for layout purposes. Tables are for tabular data only. With the use of CSS you can easily have one section of a page with expands. And if images are used correctly, the image can adjust accordingly.
Forget about slicing anything. Learn to use background images in CSS. It will make your coding experience 358% more enjoyable.
Here are a few CSS tutorial links:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/CSS/Getting_started
http://www.htmldog.com/guides/css/beginner/
http://www.echoecho.com/css.htm
(I'm not directly endorsing the links. Just things I found with a quick search.)
Maybe you should look into the html-templates Dreamweaver offers. In CS5, there is a template with a centered lay--out, split in two columns and a sticky footer. You pick "new file" from the main menu in Dreamweaver, and look under the blank html-pages.
The very nature of slicing means that you take a static image and cut it into pieces. All that you are then left with is static pieces, so those pieces wouldn't naturally be able to expand.
However, there are some tricks you can do. If the content section is expanding and the left nav is moving with it, try setting the left nav's vertical align property to top (in the Properties panel in Dreamweaver, look for "Vert" when you're in a <td> cell). If you're having problems with the image in the content cell repeating, get the image out of the cell and into the CSS background property for that cell and have it repeat.
Also, it's possible to export slices as DIVs instead of a table, right? I've not experimented with that, but it could be something else to try.
As others have commented, there are better ways to build web sites. But if this is what you need to do, hope these tips help you out.
