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It might be a slow route between the user and the web host. I tired tracerouting to your server and it dies halfways and the speed is not the fastest, but not slow either.

I wouldn't have thought that the javascript would make it as slow as it is. Possible reasons could be the number of images you have on that page, the actual server being a slow one, bad code? I can see 7 empty tags that could be gotten rid of so it could be the coding that's not helping matters.

It would also be a good idea to switch from Macromedia's javascript (which is notoriously bloated - I really hope they fix that in future versions) to something less complicated. Also take out the font tags and put all that in a stylesheet instead.

The cardinal rule for webpage download size is 90k. Your code comes in about 8.3k so that's not it, however you have somewhere around 300k of images not counting the hidden roll over images which will add another 100 - 200k. If your client has a slow connection it'll seem slow, or if you are hosted on a slow server or a server that hosts other busy sites.

You can cut down the sizes of your images substantially.

For instance: housefront.gif is I think a 200+ color gif image @ 52K. I cut that down to 4 colors and it looks fine @ 6.4k or even better I used jpeg compression at 30% optimized to cut it down to 4.3k. That's close to a 90% savings in download time.

Generally speaking images with gradients should be compressed as ,jpegs and images with solid colors should be compressed as .gifs. Generally html text will be smaller than image text.

Code will generally not take up that much space so it generally downloads pretty fast, however, If the code requires extensive complex calculations and the client computer has a slow processor then it may seem to download slowly. I've written code that is very long, and does take time to download however I'm not a great coder. A good coder can simplify the code (script etc not html) to make the file size smaller. Each character in code requires a finite amount of space so you can actually shrink the code slightly by shortening the names of your image files or functions or variables etc.

In addition if you have extensive complex server code or large database searches on a slow server, that can slow down your pages. That's why IBM can sell very expensive servers to big businesses.

In your case however you need to become better at image compression.

That'll be $50 please.

The site loads within 15 secs for me and I'm on a 56K connection.