Your primary task as a website designer is to create pages that will load quickly. You know that the attention span of most net surfers is very short. If your site hasn't loaded its first page in about 20  seconds, you can kiss that visitor goodbye -- and they won't be coming back. After all, even if you surf the Web from a fast connection such as Cable or ADSL, it's a sure thing that most of your visitors do not.

While there are no hard rules for page and image sizing, we believe for most purposes, a total  file size of 50K is plenty. Here are some tips on how you can reduce load time and keep your visitors happy.

Forget the theme music.
Unless you must have the music you should think about whether embedded files such as Flash or Sound are really necessary. This is especially true of your index page, or whatever is the doorway page for most of your visitors.

Use the same images more often, and pre-load them for use on other pages.
Use the same images, where possible, on multiple pages. Since images are stored on the visitor's computer, you should be using the same images on other pages whenever possible. If your landing page is expected to be viewed for a few seconds (why wouldn't it?), you can also pre-load images for other pages by placing them discreetly at the bottom of your landing page and coding the width and height attributes to values of "1". This will load the image in their browser cache prior to it ever being used, making it much faster when eventually called on other pages.
For Example: <IMG SRC="yourimage.gif" width="1" height="1" border="0">

Another method is the use of a simple java script that you can insert in the Head of your code to load images in the background as the rest of your page loads. The browser will cache the images (store them on the visitor's computer) and then immediately display them wherever they're used on subsequent pages. Browsers that don't recognize java-script code will simply ignore it. Images won't preload, but will still display on your pages exactly as before. Insert the following code into your HEAD tag. Be sure to use the correct name and path for your image. And when you call on that image later, be sure that you use the same name and path for each image file.  If you stored the image in an images folder, don't call on a file that you also stored in another folder.  Keep it consistent.

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE = java-scriptgt;
if (document.images)
{
img1 = new Image();
img2 = new Image();
img1.src = "imageName1.gif";
img2.src = "imageName2.gif"
}
</SCRIPT>

Use width and height attributes on your image tags.
This is crucial. Without them, the entire page can be held up from showing, or its layout can be altered after loading. By coding images in proper sizes, other elements on the page, such as text, will pre-load. If you don't, your visitor will probably leave.

Check your HTML code for unnecessary line breaks and single use of tables and fonts.
If you are adding rows of line breaks between your code, this can slow you down. Also, nesting tables inside tables can slow processing, not by much, by maybe by enough to lose just one visitor ... one too many. Use multiple tables instead of very large single tables to help browsers more quickly process your pages. And finally, limit the instance of font tags if possible. Use a global font at top and close at the bottom of your page.  Here is where Cascading Style Sheets can be useful, although not all browsers are capable of handling them, yet.