When you log into the control panel and click "Options", how are the site URLs listed?

If you view source, are the link paths all definitely absolute? (If so, I haven't seen that before). Does this also apply to image paths? I know if you're using the control panel to upload images, the resulting markup generated by WP will use an absolute path based on whatever URL you've set in the "Options" tab (see my first response). Hope this helps.

Judging by the image path, that is definitely evident of someone using the WP control panel to upload images (I'm not sure why that's a disadvantage though). If you want to create your own /images/ folder elsewhere and link to it relatively, you can always do that, but you'd have to manually save images there instead of using the uploader tool in Wordpress.

By dev area do you mean in the Wordpress theme files?

If so then you can change them to point to files within the current theme directory by using the following
<?php bloginfo('wpurl'); ?> replaces with the URI set in the options page
<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?> replaces with the directory of the stylesheet, usually "http://yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/you-theme-name/" - this is ideally where you should store all your files, and create image/script folder inside here
then you can access an image by <img src="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/image.jpg" />

If you're uploading images in posts or pages then don't worry about anything, WP will automatically put them in it's uploads folder and create links to them.