The Ninja Space Goat wrote:yea I appreciate that... I have checked the speed report myself... just not sure how to reduce a lot of those without sacraficing the look of the site.
I didn't look at how you are doing the mouseovers, and there may be a more efficient method - do some googling.
But the first thing you should do is move *all* the javascript out into a seperate (external) file. That will allow the file to be cached, loaded in a seperate thread, and most important of all - compressed. You need to do the same for *all* the css and style information.
Once you have the external files,
compress the external files using php. That will reduce the size and the download time. You can use it on both the CSS and the JS, which is over 50k of the page size, which will probably reduce down to about 20k. Thats ~30k savings without changing *anything* visible to the user.
Next, redo all the images with png+pngcrush. I quickly tested a few of the images on the page, and they benefit from it. It should save you a solid 10-20%, and at 137k, they are the largest part of your page. 20% would gain you another ~20k off the page size.
Together, that would be over 1/3rd faster.
To get better savings than that, you'll have to trade some visual elements. Personally, I think the header is *far* too large. People come to that page for content, not a pretty picture and navigation elements. At 1024x768, almost *HALF* the page is the graphical header and the nav system. I have to scroll down to see the contents!
If you don't want to be that aggressive, at least switch out the mainheader, seminarschedule, and partner graphics with simple css text layovers. That should save you ~2-5k.
Beyond that, you are looking at dramatically changing the page.