This site is maintained with AOLPress 2.0 and Microsoft Frontpage 2000.

The Star of Life background was created by taking a regular Star of Life picture that I drew by hand on the computer several years ago, then copying it. The copy was split into two pieces vertically. The complete Star of Life was then copied, along with the other two pieces, onto a new picture. The complete Star of Life was placed on top, with the split pieces being swapped from their sides to the other, below. This was then pasted all together into one picture. The reason for this, is that the half pieces combine together with the next piece over,  when the background tiles to cover the page, so that you just don't have row after row of Star of Life's. Since the Star of Life is bright blue, using it as a background as it was, would take the focus off the page contents too much. We wanted to just have a suggestion of the Starof Life, without it overpowering the foreground. To keep this from happening, it was copied over onto a white background, with the copy being set to about 90% transparency. This causes the faded look. You will have to experiment with your particular graphic program to get the same effect, depending on the Star of Life you use.

The 'Florence County Emergency Medical Services' header was made in Corel Presentations, as a 3d text object with an offset shadow. It was then moved to a paint program, and slightly blurred, which smoothed it out somewhat, and gave it the appearence of rounded letters. It was then masked, and saved as a transparent gif so the background could show through.

The Florence County seal was copied over from the artwork on the Florence County site. It was scanned and reworked by Wesley Neville of the Florence County Sheriffs Office, who is doing the work for the Florence County site. It was masked and saved as a transparent gif so that the background could flow up to the patch, instead of being in a square box of color.

The Florence County EMS patch was scanned in and cleaned up in a paint program. It was masked and saved as a transparent gif.

The South Carolina state Emergency Medical Technician, Emergency Medical Technician - Intermediate, and Paramedic patches were scanned in from real patches and cleaned up in a paint program. They were saved as transparent gifs, so that they would not have a block shape, but rather that the background could flow directly up to the sides of the patch, like the county seal and EMS patch did.

The USA and South Carolina flags were copied from the Animation Factory, which has a wide range of animated gifs for free and for sale in collections.

The text buttons for navigation on the front page were made in Microsoft Image Composer. They were exported individually as separate files. Each file was then loaded into Ulead Photopaint 4, and color reduced to 20 colors. This cut the size of the file greatly, so that each button was only about 500 bytes or so. They load very quickly. Going below 20 colors in this case causes loss of details in the text.