When Bill Gates gave 10 million dollars to the Washington Community Colleges for computer training, in 1996, he stressed that he did not need programmers as much as he needed designers, and photographers. Because that would make web pages stand out from all the others.

Since then, Gates has spent billions buying up the major stock photo agencies in the world. He knows that the photograph is the essence of communication. When his daughter was three years old she could pick out the cereal by name at the store. It wasn't because she could read, but she associated pictures with sounds. That's how we learn. There are 1,984 languages spoken in the world, but we only see one - photography.

So how important is the photograph on the web page? Randall Tomaras thinks it is the most important element. He thought that way before

computers became a way of life. Now that computers are processing information quicker and they have designed a way for photographs to load immediately, the photograph will play a major part on the internet.

Randall Tomaras got involved with the internet in 1986 out of necessity. He designed a photography web site on paper and asked 10 local webdesigners to bid on the job. The lowest bid was $32,000 and many of the things Randall asked for were not available back then. So he decided to learn web design for himself.

Three months later he had one of the top photography web sites on the internet. Back then there wasn't the traffic there is today, nor the competition.

At the turn of the century, Randy figured that enough people were getting on the internet, so he designed another portrait web site . He had huge success, averaging over 5,000 hits a day. That's over 1.5 million hits a year. People started