I am currently in the process of designing a site for a band.

The background that I've designed in Photoshop CS5 is fairly detailed, it has a texture, a photo, some brushes and a radial gradient.

For the navigation I would like to create a CSS sprite as apparently it will help with load times?? And the text for the navigation buttons I would like to do in HTML as it will help with SEO??

So firstly......am I going in the right direction? Would you slice up the background that I designed in PS, if so how many images? 1? 2? 3? What file type would you save them as, gif? png? jpeg? Can I then put content, navigation buttons, footers, etc etc over the top of this when using HTML/CSS?

The reason I ask is that I've been reading that slicing up templates in photoshop is bad for SEO, is this true or am I looking too far ahead?

If you have any tips or advise it would be greatly appreciated as I am fairly new to this.