This design has been in the works for a few days, but I just hadn't been able to tear myself away from the TV for long enough to implement it until now. So, here it is, the new Abby-look to Asymptomatic.
I took this picture the other day and thought, "You know, you could probably put that picture right on the home page." And *poof*, there it is. Isn't she cute?
I have another picture that I'm thinking of putting on the inside article display page, but it's currently in my notebook, so I'll have to get time to work on it in there. I just installed PhotoPaint in there the other evening, so I don't even know how well it runs there. Fireworks seems to run just fine, though, during the short time I actually tried it.
If you are interested in how I put it together, here's how it goes: I took the picture with the Mavica MVC-CD200 (which it seems they don't sell any more) in my living room in "normal" light. That is to say, I pulled the drapes open to let in sun, which is unusual in the living room.
I then processed the digital photo with Corel Knockout 1.5 to remove the background. There is actually a lot of stuff in the background of the picture as you can see here. Some toys, TV, etc. The left side didn't clean up as nicely as I would have liked, but it didn't matter too much because I chopped that part off when I did the next couple of steps.
I pulled the knocked out photo into PhotoPaint, and did some final cleaning on the image borders while applying it to a solid gray background. 
After that was complete, I popped the image into Fireworks to add the blue band and text to the top, and slice the image into an HTML table.
I opened the table in DreamWeaver and used the CSS editor to change one of the images from an <IMG> tag into a background image of a table cell. Then I goofed with the table and cell arrangement until I got something suitable for page layout.
Seems like a lot to do to get one page online, eh? It didn't actually take that long, comparatively speaking. I'm hoping that the image for the internal article page converts as smoothly.
Abby was particularly pleased to see her picture in the computer. I was showing Berta the new design when Abby walked in, pointed at the screen and said, "That's Abby!"
