Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site lists minimizing HTTP requests as the very first recommendation. One of the ways they suggest doing that is by using CSS sprites (which I mentioned previously in Clever Ways to Save Bandwidth).
I recently applied this technique to a series of social media icons. Here’s an example:
http://osric.com/chris/css-sprites-social-media-icons-example.html
The example page uses a single image to display 8 separate icons from the following single image:
Be careful when using background images as links. Continue reading CSS Sprites and Accessibility