Icons beat imagemaps

The last thing you want to do when presenting information on the Net is to make your customers wait for it. Graphic designers have gotten carried away with home pages that feature large imagemaps--big graphics that can be clicked in different areas to lead to different parts of a web site. But big imagemaps take a long time to load, and your customer can't do anything in the meantime except sit and wait. If you want to use graphics to jazz up your home page, use one or more small icons rather than an imagemap. You can use an icon to represent each of your site's departments, and because the graphic files used for the icons are small, they'll load much more quickly than a single large graphic.