Making delicious buttons and modifying HoverBox3

Hi!

I have observed that more and more on the web, buttons on websites look very pro. They have a glossy beautiful shine on them, that transforms boring buttons to sparkling delicious "MUST CLICK"-"MUST HAVE" kind of super attractive clickable paintings..... How?

Lets just throw in an example:

The specific reason I am posting this question right now is because I need to translate that very button to norwegian..

The picture(button) is a part of the HoverBox3 that overlays every product image in the store.

What kind of application(s) is used to produce pictures with this kind of beautiful effect?
If photoshop is used, how? any howto links? any plugins?

I really don't know how to find how to's to making these kind of pictures on the web, because I don't know what to search for.

And another question. How do I modify the generation of this image so that the norwegian version is used when norwegian language is chosen and the english version when english is used?

Here is some coding I found, the coding that generates the button upon the different product images in the store I think:

  echo zen_image($products_image_medium, $products_name, MEDIUM_IMAGE_WIDTH, MEDIUM_IMAGE_HEIGHT) . '<div class="lrgarea"><a href="'. zen_hoverbox_IH2_url($products_image_large, addslashes($products_name), LARGE_IMAGE_WIDTH, LARGE_IMAGE_HEIGHT) .'" class="hoverbox" rel="gallery[group]" title="' . $title . $price . $hoverbox_pdesc . '"><img src="' . $template->get_template_dir('/vlrg-pinfo.jpg',DIR_WS_TEMPLATE, $current_page_base,'images/hoverbox'). '/vlrg-pinfo.jpg" alt="View Larger" class="lrglink" /></a></div>';
  }else{
  ?>

Thank you for every single reply!

Svein Daniel

You do need a good image editor / graphics program to create decent images.

I use several, but an easy one is Microsoft Image Composer. This was originally bundled with FrontPage '97, and I'm not sure if it is commercially available anymore.

There are FREEWARE graphics programs, and a google search should take you to a few.

There is a very nice web-based tool for generating Zencart Buttons. You can either choose one of their template buttons, or create custom buttons from your own graphic elements.

http://www.advancewebsoft.com/downloads/free-scripts/free-oscommerce-cre-loaded-zen-cart-oscmax-button-generator-p.html

Oh, thank you for that one!

Now that I have pro translated buttons the way I like, how to I translate the picture in the first post?
and how to I modify HoverBox3 so that it will pick the translated button when norwegian language is chosen (which is standard)