Why do you want to do this? Simply so that your visitors do not have to wait for a long time while your graphics load.

Animations

Check section called "Animation Mistakes" for many common errors with animated graphics. Suffice to say that less is generally better.

Graphics which Require Plug-Ins

There are some graphics formats which require exotic and obscure plug-ins in order to be seen. While there are advantages to using plug-ins (Adobe Acrobat comes to mind as an excellent plug-in to use) they should be avoided when possible. Most of your visitors will not take time to install a plug-in just to see your web site.

Garish backgrounds

Keep your background graphics simple and neat. You want to make sure graphics are subtle and contract greatly with your text. In other words do not use a light pink background with light red characters. Very hard to read. Also avoid neon or other bright backgrounds - these tend to so overpower your web site that people leave almost immediately.

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- Navigation on a very long page becomes difficult, if not impossible. One of major advantages to splitting up a long document into many smaller pages is control you gain over navigation.

- Other web sites will find it difficult to link to specific content on your page. This is web, and webmasters want to link to pages on a site which pertain to their own content. If you have one long page, you effectively discourage this kind of linking, which means you will get fewer links. No matter what you think about intrasite linking (linking to anything except homepage), majority of webmasters will do so. Your best course of action is to make it easy for them to link to any page on your site (not, of course, directly to graphics, sounds or multimedia - that is bandwidth stealing).

You have to remember when you are creating a web site that's it's a web site. You are not creating a book which goes from front to back - you are creating a web of links from page to page.

The really good webmasters learn how to take supreme advantage of this fact and create web sites that are a dream to navigate. Pages flow from one to other, with links here and there where appropriate. A good webmaster would never (except under some special conditions) create a huge page of text or graphics - that's not way web works.

So what do you do? Take advantage of hyperlinks and split a large document up into as many smaller documents as necessary. Link them together as appropriate. Using this simple technique, you can create documents that are interesting and in which visitors are interested (which is what is important, after all).