The answer is that from a tax point of view, it is advantageous to trade through a limited company as long as income is drawn from company by owners as dividends from their shares and amount of dividends drawn is restricted below 40% band rate (i.e. œ31,063 for tax year 2002/03). That way, owners have no further personal tax ("income tax") to pay. Moreover, dividends are not subject to national insurance contributions. This is excellent news of course. But, if dividend income falls within higher rate bracket of income tax (i.e. above œ34,515), they will be taxed at 22.5% on excess, which of course will increase tax burden. The company profits are subject to corporation tax rates. Those are lower than income tax rates.

The most catastrophic scenario is when director takes his reward from company as salary. Then his/her salary is taxed at income tax rates (like a sole trader's income). That is because, unlike sole traders, tax system treats companies as separate from their owners because a company is a separate legal entity. The problem is that income taxes are higher than corporation tax rates. On top of that, they will be subject to employee and employer national insurance contributions, which of course increase tax burden and render his position worse than even an unincorporated business ("sole trader"), because NIC Class 1 on payroll are higher than NIC Class 2 paid by self employed.

In contrast, a self employed person ("sole trader") is taxed at income tax rates on profits from his business, which are added to his other sources of income. As it has already been mentioned, income tax rates are overall higher than corporation tax rates. On top of income tax, national insurance contributions class 4 are payable on business profits within a specified band (7% on profits between œ4,615and œ30,420). National insurance contributions Class 2 are also paid by self-employed people, although those are lower than those payable by company directors on their salaries.

To illustrate above, let's take a simple example. We have a limited company and a sole trader. They both make œ60,000 profits each in tax year 2002/03. We assume that company director takes a salary equal to amount of his personal allowances (untaxed income) of œ4,615 and balance as dividends. The company will pay corporation tax at 19% equal to œ10,523 and nothing else. The sole trader will pay income tax œ16,542, National insurance Class 2 œ104 and National insurance Class 4 œ1,806. Total œ18,452. The bottom line is that person that has incorporated his business into a limited company will make a tax saving of œ7,929 compared to a sole trader! Isn't that fantastic?

Somebody might be wondering: why is this entire happening? The official explanation is that, this government, to help economy grow, encourages people to leave as much profits within their businesses to be reinvested, instead of being taken out and spent.

You're on your way home. You have two choices. You can either take route that is shortest in terms of distance but has many stoplights, or you can take route that's a little longer distance-wise, but has no stoplights. Which do you choose?

I choose #2, and so do many web surfers.

Why? Because it's better to keep moving.

I want to look. I want to read. I want to buy. I *don't* want to wait 67 seconds for a page to download because site designer thought it would be a good idea to use a picture of his pet ferret in a snappy little beret as an image map.

We all know graphics slow a site down, so is it possible to keep visitors from mousing away without publishing a text-only site? Sure. It's simply a matter of balancing aesthetic appeal and load time. I'd like to discuss a couple of ways to do just that.

Before we get started, though, do me a favor and take a trip to Web Site Garage and get a free Tune Up on a page you'd like to speed up. Be sure and write down load times for your page under various modem speeds because you'll use these later as a benchmark to gauge effectiveness of your changes. Oh, and don't forget to make a backup copy of your page (and images) "as is", in case you aren't happy with changes and want to restore it to its original condition.

Once you've done those things, we're ready to tackle two methods to trim load times: reduce number of images on your page(s) and reduce size of remaining images.

REDUCE THE NUMBER OF IMAGES ON YOUR PAGE(S)

Take a cold, objective look at your site. Try to view it through a visitor's eyes. Which graphics are necessary and which are superfluous?

Can you manipulate text with HTML (bold, italic, font face) as opposed to using a text graphic? Can a clickable image be replaced with a text link?

Cutting expendable graphics can greatly speed page load time. Assess each graphic one-by-one to determine if it should stay or go; keep only those that are essential.

Use Flash animation wisely.

No doubt about it, Flash movies are extremely cool - when done well. "Because it looks cool", however, isn't a reason to add something to your site.