Reuse the same graphic files as much as possible. If you use the same graphic files on each page it will drastically reduce the load time of your web pages.

For instance, if you use a dialup connection, you will have noticed that the first time you came to our web site it took about 15 seconds to load the first web page. After that, it only takes 4-5 seconds because the same graphic file is already in your cache and doesn't need to be downloaded for each page.

Put all of your graphic files in the same folder/directory so that every page is using the same file. This is for the same reason as above. If you have multiple copies of the same graphic file, the web browser will need to reload the graphic for each page.

Do NOT publish your web site with FrontPage, use an FTP program. FrontPage will create many separate subdirectories with duplicate copies of the same graphic files for each page which forces the graphic files to be reloaded on each page instead of from cache.

Whenever possible use the jpg format instead of gif or another format. The jpg format compresses the file into the smallest size possible while keeping the same amount of colors. NEVER use bmp, tif or other very large file formats.

If you need to have a transparent background on your image to overlay it on top of a background and/or a small animated image the gif format would be best.

If you need a large animation, the Flash format would be best.

When creating an animated file, you can usually delete a good portion of the frames without making the image look 'jerky'.  For instance, our logo at the top left of our old web site has had almost 2/3 of the frames removed. It went from 250K to14K by the time we finished optimizing it. Selective removal of frames may take some extra time but it will be well worth the effort.

Crunch the files as far as they can go. Most graphics files can be optimized by your paint program or animation program to a size which is much less than the original size. When you do this, make sure to select the 'web safe colors' option to make sure that the file displays correctly on all computers. Always optimize all your graphics files before uploading them.

Note: If your target audience has very old computers or uses Web TV, you should view each file in the 256 color mode to make sure that they were not over-optimized.  To do this, just change your computer's display mode to 256 colors and view all the pages on your web site to see if the graphics are OK.

Do NOT overlay several graphic images on top of each other in your web page. It would be much better to overlay these images as transparent layers in your paint program. Then when done, merge the layers and save it as one single optimized graphic jpg file.

Avoid displaying text as a graphic file whenever possible. Straight text is only a few bytes and will load very quickly, a graphic file will be many thousands of bytes and will slow down the load time of your web page. 

Use standard palette background colors in your tables as background colors instead of graphic files. Standard palette colors are generated automatically by all computers which saves the load time that a graphic background file would take.

For instance, the background color of the side bars on our web site are done this way. The light blue is a table background color as well as the thin white lines against the highlight bars which are small tables with a white background.