It's actually a 2 step process. First, you create the actual button bar, then run it through the Image Slicer to cut it up and make the individual buttons clickable.

If you ready, lets get started......

Fire up Photo Impact and from the menu select Web/Component Designer. A window like this will open:

In this case I selected Button Bar/Rounded and the 4th set on the top row. Select Next and this winow will open:

Now we're ready to start creating our button bar. The default setting is only 4 buttons, but you can add more from this window as you go along. I'll only work on the basic default settings, and you can play around with them later on.

Now, in this image, the top box is the text that will appear on the button, the lower box shows the 4 default buttons, with the first button selected. So select the top box, type in the text you want your button to have an press Enter.

Now select the 2nd button in the bottom window, then in the top window add the text for your next button and so on, until you have the 4 buttons done.

You can also click on the Shadow Tab to add a nice shadow effect to your buttons. when your done, it should look something like this:

Now you want to select Export/To Photo Impact and you new button bar will be sent to the Photo Impact workspace.

Now, before we can start to slice it up, we want to run it through our Image Optimizer. But we want to make sure we have everything we want included in our image selected first.

So select your Pick Tool from the Tool Bar:

Then click on each element of your button bar. You are going to have basically 3 elements.... the button itself, the text and the shadow.You will need to hold down the Shift key while selecting the elements to get them all. When your done it should look like this:

Now right mouse click and select Combine as Single Object. Your image should look like this:

Ok, now we can run it through the Image Optimizer. So from the menu select Web/Image Optimizer/Selected Images Only and this screen will appear:

We want to select the GIF option:

Now select the Background tab. We want our button bar to seamlessly blend in with the background we are using for the web page, so select User Selected Image, scroll to where we have our background image stored and select it.

Finally, save your button bar. Heres the finished product:

Move on to Slicing the image to learn how to make our buttons clickable.