It has always been my preference to use jpegs whenever possible. despite their lack of transparency you can get pretty good file sizes without any loss in your color pallete. Pages with a background color and no background image are easier to read, quicker to load, and easier to match images to without using transparent gifs. I am just generally against gifs for anything but small and simple animations. Also I have been known to beat up my coworkers for pronouncing GIF as JIF. (it's Graphics Interchange Format and Graphics does not have a J sound) Sorry for the rant...