The background gifs on the DROD homepage are 300kB altogether (that's 1-1.5 minutes downloading on dialup) This can be significantly reduced by cropping the art carefully, and reducing the colour depth. I went ahead and did this, and the gifs I got were a total of 75kB.
These gifs do look ever so slightly different to the originals (I pushed the colour reduction as far as I could go) If that's not good enough, anything between 75-175kB is achievable, but I'd prefer it to be lower since it's only a background. The buttons do look good though, so it'd be a shame to lose the overall theme.
I also optimised the AIM icons, reducing them from a total of 40 to 20kB with no visual difference.
There are a few other incidentals, barely worth mentioning, which I also optimised (for instance, minibeethro.gif looked a little crappy, so I redid it and got a better looking gif at half the size)
Posted or mailed on request, if there's any interest (I'm not going to just post them here since they're not my art) There wouldn't be any visual difference to the site, just a little better responsiveness for dialup users (i.e. me
)
Also, those buttons could be optimised to a degree (I've not done so because it'd be a fair amount of work to get them looking right at a reduced colour depth) Though the potential saving aren't nearly as much as the background gifs, a reduction here would again improve responsiveness on dialup, when those button images not in the browser cache are downloaded as the mouse drifts over them (3 'highlighted' or 'button down' images = 15kB = ~4 seconds, per button)
) For larger art, it pays to check though. I don't have a good GIF>PNG converter (the one I'm using, PSP7, produces fullcolour PNGs, rather than restricted palette, by default)
The advantage of gifs is that the URLs don't need updating... There comes a point where saving a few bytes isn't worth the effort, unless you're doing something like the Google or Yahoo homepage.