This web development style seems to be common with Chinese/Japanese websites. It's a lot easier to style your text with the fancy effects you want if it's an image.
Maybe it also let's you go through China's GFW if you have some censorable content. But I'm sure the front-end developers I work with (in Portugal) are not thinking in censorship when they do that.
Well, back when browsers gave you any character set you wanted as long as it was ISO-8859-1, that was probably the only reliable way to build a web page that displayed Chinese/Japanese native script.
