What is the best way to preload sliced gifs?

[dubinsf]

Someone told me to put an alt tag for each cell, and I tried that however it seems to be set to a default color that doesn't match the style of the design. Does that mean that you have to style the alt tag? If so then how? Also is this the best way to preload images to get a cleaner download when accessing the site? What are the alternatives?
Thanks Much

[the tree]

Preloading is useful to take away lag from rollovers, and if the next page has many images in it, for images that are going to load anyway, it does nothing*.
Slicing images mean larger file sizes and there's rarely any point to it, if ever.
Alt attributes are only meant to come up for non-graphical browsers or if the images is broken although some browsers (IE, I think) display a tool-tip on hover, but as this is a browser feature and not one of your markup, you can't (and shouldn't) change it.


*Actually, it slightly slows down your site, but not by much.