Why not trim down the graphics and code so it loads fast without the secret command?

What is the URL? I can look at the pagre and make suggestoins.

We have trimmed and trimmed and my web designer has worked on the HTML. You are more than welcome to take a look at the home page.

As you can see, the home page is designed to provide links to the rest of the site. The site is about 450 mgs and is the only place on the internet where most of this information can be found. The subject is a bit different and sounds rather boring, but we average about 65,000 hits a month with most of our visitors staying to view many pages or download from our lists. We get our visitors from all over the world and have sent out more than 7,000 packets of seeds with all requests coming from the site.

The object of the home page was to have a zippy look - with direct links to the more popular areas of study. The site has been up for almost 5 years and this will be the first real update.

I will be interesting in your comments and those from any other web experts on this forum.

sps

Here is a link that might be useful: BiblicalGardens.org

What are those 14 objects at the top of the page, below the "recommend to a friend"? I see an icon that tells me they aren't going to be loaded by my browser.

I see multiple links to "kids stuff", multiple links to plant information, etc. I'd move the director's pictures off the front page, consolidate the various links to books, get all the links to plant info together, and tone down the brightly-colored fonts to eliminate the supermarket flyer appearance of the site. It's hard to tell what your site is about because of all the bits strewn about.

It's also very choppy and gaudy -

Thank you for the suggestions. I appreciate the time you have taken to review the site. We will certainly consider the various ideas that you mention.

sps

Part of the problem that I see is that you are not using thumbnails for the clickable images -- you're just making the images display in a smaller space so that the full images are loading when the page loads. Create small thumbnail images of the flowers that you click on to get a bigger image -- that will substantially reduce the size of your overall page.

Consider optimizing your images as well -- you can substantially reduce the size of them by using a program like Macromedia Fireworks, or if that's not available, then you can do it for a small fee through this site: http://www.spinwave.com/crunchers.html Recognize that you trade quality for lower file size, so what's best is that you find a happy medium in which quality is only minimally affected, but for the largest gain in lower file size.

I agree with the earlier poster -- you've got way too much on a single page. You're inundating the user with so much info that it's overwhelming. Find a way to better organize the data so it's not all on one page.

Also, no offense -- but it's obvious that whoever is doing your graphics needs some help. The text graphics have very jagged and unclean edges, and some of the pictures of the people in the board of directors are very poor quality or weirdly stretched. If having a clean, well-designed appearance is important to you, then you may want to consider hiring a professional web-designer. Your site contains a lot of info, but it's currently very amateurish looking.