The key to putting up images on the web is optimisation. It's vital to crush the little blighters down to within an inch of their lives as hefty, bloated images = unhappy surfers.

Although some folk are lucky enough to enjoy high speed web access, there's still a lot stuck with creaking 14.4k and 28.8k modems - and don't forget those on the road accessing through laptops and slow data cell phone connections.

People don't like to wait for pages to download, so if we work on the assumption that they'll start to get twitchy after a ten second wait, that gives you an upper limit of an 18k page size for 14.4 modems and 35k for 28.8. Not much, huh?

Keeping the load time of your pages down is critical. The larger the file, the longer the user is has to wait for it to appear - and the more likely they are to bugger off elsewhere.

Huge unnecessary graphics are the sure-fire trademark of an amateur site - so be sparing with your graphics!

Most mainstream graphics programs offer tools to optimise and export files in the most popular web formats or you can use the free online tools listed opposite.