I'm still pretty new to HTML. I designed this webpage for a website for the nonprofit I work for: www.getvaxed.org/vaxes.htm -- but reviewers have complained that it looks bad when it loads -- text loads before the white background it's on, menu buttons (at top) come in too slowly...

Is there anything I can do to help things load up better? I don't know if it's the use of graphics (too many?), or if I could make better use of <div> and CSS, instead of the table, as I saw some other people mentioning...

Any advice is greatly appreciated.
thank you.

Franji Mayes
PKIDs
www.pkids.org

Most of that has to do with the way tables are rendered, yes. Eliminating tables would help a lot. Cleaning out the in-line styles and putting all style info into a linked CSS file would also help.

Size-wise your page isn't that heavy.

This is just advice in general; I don't know if any of it will help with your specific problem or not.

Instead of putting all your styles at the top of the page, put them in a separate CSS file. Your page is already pretty small, but this will shave about 1/3 off of it. The first time someone comes to your site they'll still have to download all the data, but as they bounce from one page to another or come back next month, their browser will pull the styles out of the cache instead of from your site, speeding everything up.

Also, you have <p class="style1"> throughout your page. Just redefine / override p instead. You can change the HTML with a search and replace, but then in future when you add to the page, it'll be simpler, not having to tag all your paragraphs.

Your page will load in a much more visually-pleasing style if you set a background color for your table cells which is close to the background color of the images which will fill the backgrounds once they have finished loading - as it stands, the default (transparent) background is being displayed until the background images load.