MArk, looks like you are having some success with xwd.

A few comments:

The pictures that are recessed into the white boxes on the right are (in some cases) a little off center, and the interior shadow is a little too blurred into that area, so it looks a little sloppy/dirty. With the rest of the site built on very clean, almost neon, lines, these blurs seem out of place.

The site pops up in many stages like a lot of the xwd sites I've seen (including a site I did a while back. There seem to be a ton of objects (and therefore requests for them, with latency each time) on xwd produced pages and some things really need to be grouped to get around this, or in some cases, some manual exporting of larger images needs to be done to force them a little smaller. It seems the biggest issues with most of the sites I've seen have the slow-loading, pop up feel to them are those that have graphics that are large. The ones with smaller graphics come in the same way, buit all the pics are small enough that you sort of see like a card deck fanning out of the pics - not really an issue, and if they are mostly the same from page to page, it runs from cache, but with the larger images, you can actually see the page being put together - on my demo site, I actually saw the inividual characters of a word being placed on the screen (this was a xarax doc), as if done with Flash on purpose. There are SO many images in that site. I'm sure some of it is me, but I think some is xwd and some optimization that needs to be done with some of the outputted code. Some folks have worried that the absolute positioning is the issue, but it seems more "too many requests" possibly for "too large sized objects" to me.

FWIW: your blurred background image is 268k, the header images add up to about 100k, another 60k+ or so for the two side jewlery items on the home page. Without going into a huge amount of detail, that's about 420k for the home page. Again, add to that a lot of requests (guessing you have lot of files) and you wind up with delay.

Hope that helps.