It was common to make tables and use them to assemble a bitmap, where each cell had zero border/margin/padding and an exact size, and contained a "slice" of the image. Web authoring tools (and Photoshop) even had explicit support for generating this sort of thing, as I recall. This was I guess simpler to automate than defining clickable regions of a single image, and it allowed for the individual pieces of the image to be requested in parallel on slow connections (adding another dimension of progressive loading).
Yeah, I remember this. Macromedia Fireworks had a slice tool that I used quite a bit. You'd basically make an image which was your website, and then do all the layout with zero border tables. But for me, this was what I was doing circa 2004 before CSS was dominant. Earlier software from the '96 era like Frontpage I think would use bitmaps whole cloth, but maybe I'm misremembering.
Ah, nothing like trying to save the logo from such a website, then discovering the image you saved is partially cut-off and includes the navbar behind it instead having a transparent background.
