But then I started getting mail from people who didn't get sarcasm. Stuff like "HAY I HAVE A K00L BACKGROUND U CAN USE HERE IT IS IF YOU NEED ANY HELP EMAIL ME THANX BYE" (thankfully, he forgot to attach the graphic) "E-mail me info about your sight. Link addresses file locations, ect. and I will make you a new sight" (like I'd let someone who didn't know the difference between 'site' and 'sight' do anything in the first place).
What people don't seem to realize is that crap like that takes time to load, and when you're on a modem located 12 hops away, you can spend most of your time waiting for the page to finish loading, when all you really needed to do was read a bit of text.
The other thing is that, quite frankly, most people suck at graphic design. They'll gleefully stuff their pages full of every animated gif they can find, add a 250K background graphic, and then set their text colors to bright pink on yellow, not because it adds anything, but simply because they can. Freedom of expression is one thing, but c'mon people! You're supposed to make people WANT to look at your site, not cringe and hit the 'Stop' button in disgust.
Just to make sure I'm getting the point across: I like my pages the way they are. I deliberately made them this way. Clean. Simple. Fast-loading. I do not plan to change them.
Here are a few links that expound on the topic: