The fields of color are done with tables, and only require a little code. They tell people that I am serious about the site without slowing it down much. If you want to use this technique on your page you can find a template I use here. You can go to view source to get the source code and then copy it. If you do this and thus avoid putting graphics on your site then I will save time when I visit you.
It is unfortunate that many web sites have to put graphics on their pages to convince readers that they are serious about their material. Businessmen wear suits to convince us they are serious, but it does not take longer to talk with them because they wear suits.
It might be a good idea to have one or more charities that would allow people to put a very simple logo, that only involved a few bytes, if people made a contribution of some specified amount. Thus we could be impressed that they had given money to the Charity instead of being impressed with the money they spent making their site fancy, and it would not take forever to load their pages.
Still one does not have to have graphics to get hits, I believe I am getting between 200 thousand and a quarter of a million hits a year. In many important areas I am number one on Google.