Image maps, psds, dreamweaver?

Background:

I am creating a website for a local doctor (vet) for free - he is a friend of the family and since I've made a few simple sites before I acknowledged his request for a website by telling him I'd whip him one up by two weeks from now. He cannot sell prescription medicine on ebay, so he would like me to create a site for him. I want to try something new - image maps.

A friend of mine told me I could use this psd template to make the site:



Obviously, I will need to edit out the text via layers in photoshop and replace them with the various types of medicine he offers for sale. My question to you, is should I use Dreamweaver to create the image maps?

Also, lets say I have a link to a narrative on a cat medicine. Can I 'blank' out the middle of the psd file and fill it with text for the description or do I have to keep the picture in its entirety?

Should I say the image mapped website as png or jpg?

Please help ! Thanks !

Don't use an image map, individually cut out each piece, save as an image and then use <DIV>Tags to build everything.

Open your PSD in ImageReady, slice them up how you want and export as GIF or JPEG if they are hi-res images. Position everything with tables (or DIVs) and bob's your uncle.

Or dramatically increase the speed of your site and don't slice images but rather design the layout using CSS. You can still use images but you only need to worry about small images here or there instead of 20+ sliced images. Images just load slowly so use CSS instead.