You have many nested tables. The entire table has to render before the table is rendered.
Also, you could move the css stuff to an external file and call it with <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style_sheet_name.css"> inside the head tags.

BTW you are not allowed to post personal URLs. An administrator will be along soon to remove your link.

Yes, looking at the source code the CSS takes about 10 - 15% of the code

Some other things to consider
1. remove all the unnecessary gaps in code, you can save bandwidth that way
2. Get rid of any code you do not feel is essential!

I have put my site in my profile now -- I did not realize I could not do this for review purposes!

Any suggestions with the nestled tables, or how to work around this?

The first thing is to avoid having one overall table that includes everything else inside. This is why the browser waits until everything is figured out before it shows even the first element of your page.

To deal with this, you can "cut" the top part of your layout into one table, and then follow that with another independent table. The first table will pop-up quickly and give the visitor something to see while the rest of the page is rendering.

Next thing, knowing that nested tables are problematic, you can guard against using them, especially going too deep. You can get many of the same visual effects using CSS for layout - and end up with one table and no nesting at all, or at the most only nest once.

I have moved the styles to an external file, works good. Thanks.

On the tables -- Can I convert the tables to layers? Dreamweaver has the feature, what will this do and would it be viewable or help?

Thanks so far, great tips!

You might want to watch the layers with cross browser. Netscape doesn't always like them.

When I loaded the page on my browser it also got snagged several times for half a second or two calling up images from other sites. In principle if you include height= and width= attributes on all the img tags this should not be a problem, but I think when the img's are embedded in tables it doesn't help that much. You might see if you can put local copies of the img's on your own server if it would be allowed. Also, I'm sure almost all of the <font>, <b>, and <i> tags could be replaced with a couple of lines in the stylesheet.

Specifying the height and width of images AND height and width of the table cells can speed up load time. Switching to CSS instead of tables would help even more.

Let me ask you all this, and thanks, if I were to split a couple of the cells in the existing tables to replace nestled tables -- would this make a difference or are split cells within a table the same as adding a nestled table?

Also, one more question:

If I create 3 tables, vertically...How do I keep each table the same width so they are lined up with one another as the viewer scrolls down...

I don't want things "jagged", you know!

Anyone?

Free_Man,

I sent you a stickymail. The link for it is at the top of the page.

One hugely complex table always renders faster than nested tables.

Thanks all, I have optimized the tables pretty much now...Now on to the next thing!

The load time is now around 2 seconds on cable modem which is respectable.