Site optimization is a black art. There are many different ideas on how to build the best site. Many of our members are professional web designers who may be willing to help you out. But first, you need to help us to help you.

Things to do before asking for help:

1: Make certain you have a properly formatted DOCTYPE in place.
See "Whats this DOCTYPE Thing"

2: Validate your site.
Many problems with websites can be resolved simply by writing proper code. HTML is a language and using incorrect syntax will cause problems.
See http://validator.w3.org/ for code validation. Certain WYSIWYG site editors do weird things to the code that break standards.

3: Make sure that all images have proper ALT tags in place.

4: Test your site with at least 3 browsers. Right now, the primary browser on Windows is Internet Explorer. Keep in mind that your visitors may be using a different browser, and that IE for Macintosh is outdated, and that there is no version of IE for Linux. Other browsers to try are FireFox, Opera, Konquerer, Netscape and Safari.

Seperate style into a seperate .css file. It will get cached and load faster. Same goes for javascript. The more stuff you can let the client cache the less bandwidth you use and the faster your site loads.

Watch images, the less the better and the smaller the better. jpg compresses nicely if you don't need transparency, gif if you do. png might be a option once Internet Explorer starts supporting it. Don't break browser navigation.

Back and forward buttons should still work, no matter what the user does. If something gets posted process it, and redirect back without it, thus keeping the back button and reload functional without resubmitting the form.