After recently starting my own website design company, I came across an
interesting fact:
There is a huge market for banner ad creation. I've recently designed
several banners for clients, and came across some info that may help you
design smaller .gif files.

If you're using .gifs for banner creation, remember that most banner
swapping companies, have a file size limit, such as 7K for LinkExchange. To
make your .gifs smaller, you have to keep in mind that the .gif compression
scheme works best when there are a large number of similar colored pixels
that are horizontally adjacent to each other. For instance, if I created a
.gif with 6 different colors across 12 pixels, like this: 121324354356, the
file size would be larger that one created with a static color (i.e.
111111111111).
Pretty obvious right? Well, this tip really applies to photos. Use Photoshop
to Gaussian Blur the areas of the photo that have very similar colors, (i.e.
the sky, or a white wall). The resulting image will compress much smaller
because the Gaussian Blur filter tends to smooth out the colors. Try it and
see.

BTW, if you'd like to see some of the banners I've created, you can see them
at http://www.spidergrafix.com . While you're there, sign up for our free
email newsletter, "The Website Designer's Journal".

Hope that was helpful (and not too obtuse :P)

Rob Willmann
http://www.spidergrafix.com

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