Gifs are great for limited colours. I've just done a 4-page site with a number of mono GIF graphics, including one of 419x796 and one of 570x58, and the whole site is less than 35K in size. Trouble is, with more colours (i.e. 256) GIFs are normally about 2 - 4X the size of 90% JPGs, and with gradual colour changes the banding does show.