Load elements faster than Javascript

So for quite sometime now I have been using javascript to manipulate elements of a website such as rotating an image upon the loading of a page.  Up until now it has worked just fine, but lately I have been bothered by the fact that you first see a placeholder image while a page loads and once the page has loaded, javascript kicks in and switches out the picture to the new image. 

This is fine and most people probably won't even notice the switch from one picture to another but it has been bugging me.  I began to do a little research and I found that there is another soulution for swapping images and it is utilizing a technology I use all the time.  PHP to the rescue!

PHP is executed on the server side "before" a page loads.  What this means for me, is that I can use logic to decide which image will be loaded into the page before the xhtml page has been compiled.  This means no noticable swapping of the image as it has already been swapped before the page has been loaded.