Scenario
We tried to customize the the master page of a SharePoint site (Team Site). The intent was to add banner image and icon to the master page. We edited the master page using SharePoint Designer 2007. We dragged and dropped the image to the master page and aligned it. We saved all the changes. Then, we refreshed the site. The changes were reflected. We saved this customized site as the site template ".stp" and shipped it Whenever someone creates a site using this ".stp", the images are not rendered in their newly created site using this site template
Cause of the Problem
After analysis we found that, the images in the master pages were not picking the URL relative to the newly created site. It's picking the URL relative to old site, from which the template was created
<img alt="" src="/Sites/old site/_catalogs/masterpage/testimage.gif" width="974" height="69"></td>
If we set the relative URL in both the Notepad and the SharePoint Designer, after the save of master page it's always not reflecting the relative URL
Resolution
We replaced the image tag with ASP.NET Image server control
<asp:Image ImageUrl="./../../images/testimage.gif" runat="server"/>
This made it to work. Whenever we need to disribute a sharepoint site template with custom master pages, it's better to use ASP.NET Image control instead of <img> tags