This week, I stumbled on two separate articles (one online, one in print) that reminded me lots of people turn off graphics when they surf. I was humbled, and thought about going home to boot some of those images off our site (I'll get back to you on that one). The point is this: if you're aiming to get your site in front of as many eyes as possible, you need to build your site as if everyone on planet was still pulling up pages with a pokey 24k modem-or a Palm Pilot, for that matter.

*If they can't see it-tell them what it is. You've probably run your mouse over an image (perhaps you could see it, perhaps it did not load) to see a yellow window pop up, with a descriptive phrase inside, e.g., "Stuffed Quetl Bird, circa 1917." If they can't see pictures, tell them what's there. You can do this by adding a scrap of code into your image tag: alt="Stuffed Quetl Bird, circa 1917"

Don't load your page with graphics, especially those "under construction" things. If graphic has nothing to do with content of your page it is best left out. "Why," I hear you ask, "shouldn't I have as many pictures as I want?" Well:

1 Visitors who still have very slow modems will simply get tired of waiting for your page to download and go somewhere else. 2 About 30% of Internet users with browsers that support images disable this feature, and some older browsers are text-only, so your page can look messy if, for instance, it's full of empty boxes. 3 Unless your home page is devoted to, say, your artwork or your prize-winning photographs, graphics can distract from content of your site. 4 A large number of graphics, especially animated and other gimmicky ones, often indicate a site lacking in real substance.