alt131 - 6:20 pm on Jan 23, 2012 (gmt 0)

All the interesting things happen when I go away for a few days ... ;)

angelil6, welcome to WebmasterWorld. Marshall is right about links to personal sites and I've explained why in more detail in the sticky I've sent.

However the speed issue is interesting. While best practise is to avoid heavily nested divs (div-itis) for lots of reasons - including speed - browsers have got so fast at reading code that is unlikely to be the sole reason a site is loading slowly. I think it is much better to learn to code from scratch rather than using something like drupal, but there are still some useful checks you can do to track down any speed issues.

First, validate your HTML and also the css. Frequently heavily nested code has unclosed elements - and that does slow loading down because browsers have to "guess" where elements should close before laying out the page and applying styles.

Second, check the content - have images been optimised, javascript compressed/minified etc?

Third, check the site as it loads in something like pagespeed which is an add-on for Firefox. That allows you to identify which page components are taking the longest to load so you can focus on improving them - and will certainly identify if a particular module is the problem as you already suspect.

Lucy, feeling like the css2.1 "warden" he he ;)
But the info about browser behaviour and language is really, really interesting. Aside from the issue of characters that all users may not have, there is the whole issue of switching the language direction as well. Did you do any tests to see whether browser behaviour changes depending on what language is set for the document?