I got my start cutting HTML in the late 90s. I worked for a development company that had partnered with various design agencies. The design agencies would produ

I got my start cutting HTML in the late 90s. I worked for a development company that had partnered with various design agencies. The design agencies would produce the mock-ups of the website in Photoshop and throw them across to us at the development agency to turn into websites. I would get the templates, use the guides tool to mark out where where the slices would be for the tables then get to cutting. You got quite adept at being able to look at a design and figure out where the spacer gifs would go, where repeating background images would go etc. Everything was laid out using nested tables (and I started with Dreamweaver but at some point just stopped using the "split" view that it had and used it only as an IDE). Once converted to HTML templates it was then plugged into a custom CMS along with any additional programming that might be needed for it. We actually hosted a payment gateway for credit card payments that customers could use. Almost a prototype version of Stripe. The whole process was very assembly line driven: PSD Designs > HTML templates > CMS integration > Custom development > Deployment