I hear 'ya. Your custom furniture site goes back a few years.
(One thing I like about my line of work is that I get to meet artisans of many different crafts.)
If creating images for buttons with the text (year) embedded is what is really bugging you, there may be another approach.
Create two "blank" buttons - one for "glow" and one for "normal".
Use the buttons as backgrounds for your archive year links (anchor points) - as outlined in the tutorial link I gave you.
This way you only have 2 (reusable) images, you are using pure CSS, you avoid the CSS3 headaches and you can add more years to your archives menu without creating any more images.
~codeDawg
