Oh, so you've seen cool websites with animations moving all over the place? You've seen balls bouncing, finger's pointing, women dancing and lots of other pictures moving on the screen while you surf. And now you want to make your own homepage or website come alive and move!

Cool. What you want is animated GIFs. A GIF is an image format which supports extremely good compression and looks very clear and sharp. In 1989, a standards committee added the ability to include multiple frames (images) within a single GIF file. This standard became known as GIF89a. It's incredibly powerful as you can create some awesome effects without the learning curve associated with Java or Dynamic HTML. In addition, virtually all browsers support GIFs in all forms, while Java and Dynamic HTML support is sometimes lacking or turned of by the user (animation can also be turned off by the user, but at least the unanimated version shows up in that case).

A good product to get if you want to do animation in this manner is Ulead's GIF Animator. Another excellent animation tool is Animation Shop from Jasc (the same folks who sell Paint Shop Pro). These products are both inexpensive and easy to use.

There are also many collections of animated GIFs available all over the place if you are not up to the task of creating your own, or if you just want to give a cool beating heart or something like that.

To create an animated GIF just use a GIF editor like GIF Animator, then include it in your web page just like any other animation. Nothing else needs to be done. One of the great advantages of GIF89a is that no plug in is required and your visitors do not need to download anything to make them work. Unless you have a really old browser, support is just built in.

But remember, please, that most visitors to your site don't want to see a whole lot of animations. Most people find looking at bouncing balls, dancing girls, juggling pineapples and spinning clocks to be incredibly annoying. Having a lot of animation is a good way to get your visitors to become ex-visitors.

Also, GIF89a files tend to be large, so again you want to be careful what you include. A good rule of thumb is no more than one or two small animations on a page and only when necessary. And be sure to make most of your animations non-looping, meaning they stop when they've gone through all of the frames.

GIF animation is rarely essential for a web site to work properly. Think through if you really need it before you put hundreds of animations on a single page. A small bouncing sign that says "buy me" is good in the right conditions, but a dozen blinking, spinning, twirling banners virtually always causes me to hit that old back button right away.