Many small 50 byte buttons requires many get requests which slows down my webpage

[websiteideas]

I've heard that something called Sprite can help with this. What are the alternatives to using Sprite? I'd rather not have to change anything in my code and graphics if possible. I have a lot of jQuery that I wrote to run a user interface with several small buttons and turning all these images into one graphic using Sprite is not sounding fun to me. Can anything be done on the server end? We're using IIS and Coldfusion 8.

[stewart]

It shouldn't be too hard to change your images to use the 'sprites' method/theory... I can't really think of anything better to suggest, anytime several images are requested and not all at once, there isn't much you can do to speed that up, to my knowledge at least.

[websiteideas]

Yeah, it's turning out to not look all that difficult. The sprites method is much easier than I though and I really don't have to change much at all in my Jquery afterall.