RE: website design

With website design you have to bare in mind the connection speed that is being used to connect to the internet. THis has a major impact on how much time uploads and downloads take. When you use images you must optimise them for web use. This means using an application such as photoshop and saving the image for the web. This will cut the image size down considerably and make upload/download times much fast. You must also resize the image to the size that you want to use, i.e. if you are using a thumbnail do not just use a 800*600 photo and shrink it in dreamweaver, you need to resize the image in photoshop. With regards to flash, if you are using dial-up internet or the vast majority of people who will be using the site are still on dial-up then it is advisable not to use flash as it does take a lot longer to load.

As long as you make sure that all your images are optimised then you should see these problems should not effect your upload/download times. As far as flash goes, if you want to use then will experience a slighlty longer upload/download time.

hope this helps
David

Also consider CSS first

Yes.

Also consider using CSS as much as possible for things such as foreground/background colours.

Sometimes keeping it simple, like an area with a differnt coloured background may be all you need, instead of a graphic.

But as David says, always show your visitors thumbnails (separate image files) which act as links to huge images.

Also, for normal web graphics, consider the type. JPG, GIF, PNG etc.

Rich