Hey Jen,

Sorry to hear about your problems, many of us have struggled with that as well when dealing with clients who have a very specific look in mind, however it does cause a bit of a problem and not just for search engines.

Keep in mind that any time your pages change, the menu must be re-rendered. Right now it's rendered as HTML / CSS but to do it as an image would require a rendering program be built and while I don't know that much about .NET, I would assume that would take up alot of server resources. Also, your statement regarding search engine friendliness is not completely true, in this day and age it's all about making a page that renders correctly and that is semantic enough to be efficient when spidered by the search engines. This factor was one of the primary reasons the company I work for adopted DNN as it's primary CMS solution. Without S.E. friendliness, having a content-rich site is pretty useless.

However, as a solution to your problem (as I've had to do this a couple times myself) I would suggest creating the images in Photoshop and then making them part of the skin, static elements if you will. I also should be able to put in some basic .js rollover ability as well. However, you will have to change these manually when the page names / locations change. In situations like these I make up a seperate "template" file in Photoshop that has the proper dimensions setup so all I have to do is load it up, change the text and "Save for web..." 

I've found myself doing this with not only image-based menus but for flash-based nav systems as well (our clients are very big on buying Flash templates and wanting us to make them work with DNN).

Hi, SilentBob. Thanks for your comments and insights!

I thought I had an idea for altering the SOLPARTMENU code to make it work with holding a different background image for each menu item, but one quick look at the vb code and I realized that it deals with all the menu items customizations differently than I originally thought. So no go with my idea!  

I had thought of using static images created with Photoshop as you described in your post as a last resort. In your experience, does it get messy trying to line things up with the SOLPARTMENU submenus pop down below the Photoshop-image main menu? Also does JavaScript work well with DNN (for the rollovers) . . . I have not experiemented DNN with the scripting yet?  This strategy seems like "cheating" and I try not to cheat. But sometimes in real life we must . . .

Yes, we too have very many Flash-oriented clients.

Thanks again,

jc

 (BTW, your comment about the need for a rendering program for menu images lost me. Why is it needed? It is not needed to display the page icons. Actually, my SOLPARTMENU altering idea was along the same line as displaying the icons . . . I figured if I can add a function to deal with getting and displaying the background images for each menu item (just as with the page icons), then I am set.)