OK, here comes the productive part, put those pages on a diet!
First, don't put unnecessary images or scripts on the page at all. Little buttons, animated images, and other things are cute, but your guests don't want to wait for them to load. If you are making a serious business site, the approach should not be similar to making a music video. A little goes a long way.
Also avoid sound and music in most cases, or at least give the user the option of controlling whether or not they want to hear it. If they want to hear music, they'll visit a music related site.
Now for specifics:
1. Don't be afraid to divide your site into a lot of pages. Most people will come looking for a specific product, and the products on each page should be related. For instance, I don't expect my dragon customers to necessarily be interested in religious items.
2. Your images never need to be at a resolution higher than 100 dpi. PC users can see 72 dpi, Mac users can see 100. Anything greater on a web page is a waste of loading time and bandwidth.
3. Use your graphics program to get the colors down to as few as possible. I use Paint Shop Pro from Jasc Software . With it I can count the actual colors used, and decrease the color depth as appropriate. Other programs have similar capabilities, or you can tweak your images with several online resources. One that will analyze your entire site is GIF Wizard .
4. Use the correct image format. Some images save better as GIFs, others as JPGs. You might have to play around to figure out which works best for you. In general, buttons, banners, and other images that have large areas of similar color save better as GIFs, and photos save better as JPGs.
5. Crop your photos. There is no need to have a lot of background showing.
6. Use thumbnail images. Some web site creation tools will do this for you automatically, and it helps a lot. With FrontPage for instance, you put in the full size image, select it, then hit ctrl-t to create the thumbnail. The sizes can be determined by you for consistency, and it automatically creates a link to the full size image.
7. Check your overall page size and load time. Again I will brag on FrontPage, it tells me at the bottom of the page I am editing how many seconds it will take the page to load at various speeds. I keep it at 56.6 because that is still what most people are able to connect at, even with 56k modems. I am especially mindful of this since I got my cable modem!
That's all I have for now, but I'll add more as I do more research!
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