In the interest of better Web design, we offer some tricks to improve load time and presentation:

Be careful you don't have images (such as a banner or a masthead) that run across the top of your screen and off the right-hand side of the monitor. The best way to avoid this problem is to keep graphics at a width of 470 pixels or less.

Save images as "interlaced." This allows a GIF to load into the browser as a fuzzy, pixelated picture that slowly comes into focus via a shutter effect. Whether this is a pleasing effect is a matter of taste. Test your graphics both with and without interlacing to see for yourself how it will look.

If you are displaying large graphics, such as photos, give your readers the opportunity to decide if they want to see them or not. The best way to do this is to make a "thumbnail" or miniature version of the graphic, that links to a larger version of that image. The thumbnail gives readers a preview; if they are interested in seeing the larger version they can click on the thumbnail. It's always a good idea to warn people if they are about to download a very large (more than 50K) graphic. Do this by including the file size in parentheses next to the thumbnail.

Some Netscape extensions to the image tag can speed up downloading time for those viewing the Web with Navigator browser.. If you specify the "height"and "width" of the graphic within the image tag, Netscape Navigator knows how much space to set aside for the graphic, and it begins downloading the text immediately. If you don't specify these attributes, the browser will immediately start calculating the image sizes first. Another Netscape extension is the "lowsrc" tag, which instructs the browser to load a low resolution version of a graphic at first, and then go back and load the higher resolution version after it has loaded everything else.

Both of these tricks allow readers to start reading text right away, rather than waiting for a page to fully download before they can see any part of it.

A border is displayed around each linked graphic. This border is the same color as all other hot links on the page. This may or may not be visually pleasing. If you don't like the way it looks, you can suppress the border by adding "border=0" to the image tag. You can also add additional tags to align the graphic to the right or left of text or to the top, middle, or bottom of a graphic. These extensions are not universally supported and can result in your page layout looking radically different -- even sloppy in different browsers, so take them with a grain of salt. Test your pages in several browsers to see how they will look, then make adjustments as necessary.

Finally, as a courtesy to people who are reading your pages with a text-only browser, include an "alt" tag inside EVERY image tag with a brief description of the image.