A well-done intro has a distinct message/purpose, it looks outstanding, and visitor is given option to skip it altogether - that's important.

REDUCE THE SIZE OF THE REMAINING IMAGES

Smaller images load faster. After you've pared down your images to essentials, it's time to reduce size (byte-wise) of what remains.

You can do this in two ways:

1. Reduce image dimensions (Width x Height in pixels). 2. "Optimize" image.

Reducing dimensions of an image isn't always a viable option. The layout of your page may depend on a particular image being a specific size (the way page appears, though, is of course relative to screen resolution). If you can safely shrink your image dimensions, do so, and then optimize. If you cannot change dimensions of images, optimize only.

"Optimizing" an image means reducing file size of image. This is accomplished primarily by removing extraneous colors from image.

For example, a GIF saved at 256 colors can usually be reduced to 128, 64, or 32 colors - sometimes even less - without compromising image quality. This can *drastically* reduce file size of an image which, in turn, (often) shaves seconds off load time.

NetMechanic , MediaBuilder , and Spinwave all offer free image optimization.

Once you've pruned extra images and optimized "keepers", upload your lighter page and go back to Web Site Garage and run Tune Up again. Hopefully, you've gained a notable improvement in page load time - or at least it's dropped to a more acceptable number.

My front page went from a load time of 22.05 seconds to 14.55 seconds on a 33.6, simply from image optimization. Still a little slow, but hey, a 7.5 second savings isn't too shabby!

Ensuring your site loads as quickly as possible is part of being a good webmaster/site designer. A quality site from a surfer's point of view will turn more visitors into customers.

javascript:window.external.AddFavorite('http://yoururl.com','the title of your page')

3. There you go! Simple, huh?

By way, this only works for IE.