What's the best way to make a simple fading banner for a webpage?

[CrazyWolfman]

Many websites I've looked at recently seem to have things which cycle through a set of pictures like a little slideshow and fade into each other. I can make a slideshow where each picture just ficks into the other (with no transition) but how could I make it so they fade? I did try said fadey thing with a gif file, but it was very big (slow to load) and quite a low quality image. Finally I'd like this to be available for people with really godawful computers? Any chance?

[boobesque]

you could try flash.
Or you can make an animated gif, but add tweening files in between.
ie, gradually make the picture more bright until it is white then add a really bright picture of a boat and gradually add more and more pictures of the boat making it successively darker with each picture

[CrazyWolfman]

Thanks, I tried the gif thing though and it didn't really work (it looked kind of patchy with not enough colours). Because I needed about 4-5 pictures to cycle though it had loads of frames and took ages to load. The flash thing sounds like a good idea though, how do I go about making a flash animation, and will using this mean much less people can view it?

[boobesque]

most people can see flash animations. You see those crappy moving advertisements from huge companies like sony, dell, hp etc on websites everywhere you go. If its god enough for Dell then im sure its good enough for you. You cant ensure that everyone will be able to see the banner unless it was text only with no formatting.