How long does this page take to load?

Load time will of course depend on a given user's connection speed. The background is barely over 100K, which is fairly small by today's standards. It might cause a little bit of a delay for dial-up users, but it loaded right up for me.

You should check with the web page speed report:

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyz...

This free service analyzes your page and tells you how long it will take to download on various speeds, and what the probably culprits are. This tool doesn't take into account the background image. Presumably the slide show will incorporate other images that will also have some cost.

Ignorming the background, this page regesters about 50K. That will take about 11.6 seconds to download on a 56K modem, which is just about as long as you can expect anyone to ask. As a general rule, you want to keep total page size below 30K.

Bring in the background image, and you can see the real culprit (as you suspected.) It weighs in at a whopping 107 KB. Broadband users may not notice, but dialup users sure will, and they probably won't stick around to see what your site is about.

Fortunately, there are some things you can do. It's a background, so it doesn't have to be perfect. Take it into your image software (I like gimp or irfanview, because they're free and very powerful) and recompress as a tighter JPG. You can probably squeeze this image down a lot smaller without losing too much detail. Experiment and see if you can get the size smaller.

You might also make the image size smaller and count on the automatic tiling to make it seem larger.

Some of the other images could definitely go on a diet. The "Slide Show" image will probably be much smaller saved as a .gif, in particular.

Fonts are a local asset. If you designed with some cool font that you have installed on your computer, that font will indeed appear when you look at the page on your machine. But fonts aren't sent like images, and so if the user doesn't have that font installed, she won't see it. You could create images if you really need the font to look like something you want, or you can just list a series of fonts and hope the user has something on the list.

Best of luck to you!

It loaded instantly for me