Animated GIFs are becoming increasingly popular on the Web, and are an easy way to highlight a point, draw attention to something new or important, or add life and interest to your page. There are several reasons for this:

• They are relatively easy to create, especially with Xara Webster and CorelXARA.
• They don't need memory-hungry plug-ins - browsers that support them do so directly.
• You don't need to learn Java or JavaScript to use them.
• They are reasonably platform-independent.

However, before you rush out and cover your Web pages with them, you should consider their disadvantages:

• They can be large, and take a long time to download.
• Unlike static Web pages, they can eat up processor time when being displayed.
• They distract the eye away from the rest of the page's contents.
• Netscape Navigator is forever writing 'Document: Done' in the status line when they loop.

Here are a few tips on using animated GIFs in your pages:

• Keep them as small as possible in terms of file size. If the cute spinning globe in the corner of your Web page is only 4K in size, no one's going to mind. If it's 40K, modem users might wonder what the point was.
• If possible, only make them loop once.
• Don't use them on every page. Keep them for when you really need them.
• Avoid using them on text-heavy pages. They'll make the text hard to read, because the reader's eyes will be distracted by them.
• Make sure the first and last frames are sensible. Browsers which can't display animated GIFs will usually display one or other of these.