Windows Paint isn't the answer. People will do business more readily with a company that presents itself professionally with custom designed images, navigator buttons, and backgrounds. To accomplish this, we render in true color and then reduce the color depths.
People hate to wait for pages to load.
A visitor to your site will often move on if the images on your pages take too long to appear. The speed in which an image loads is dramatically affected by its color depth. In most cases we can successfully lower color depth of an image without compromising quality. If you want to see an example that compares the loading speed of two virtually identical images click the image below. You will see that one image is rendered in just 16 colors, and the other is rendered in 256 colors.