My fiancee and I are busy making puppets these days.  We started at the beginning of the year with the goal to sell some puppets at the end of the year in an Arts Fair that happens in my neighborhood in December.  Right now we're just making puppets for use in our live show (which we just had our inaugural Abstract Rainbow show the other week, and we're doing it again at a different comedy theater this Saturday) to get experience at making them and figuring out what works and what we like.

This past week we officially formed our company, Abstract Rainbow.  This past weekend I began constructing our website AbstractRainbow.com.  It's far from done but I'm really excited about it.  

I've got lots of ideas for our company and our puppets.  Neither of us is quitting our day jobs or anything, but it is taking something I've been passionate about my whole life and combining it with her interests into something new and fun and we're both really happy and excited.  

It's not really ready for being put out there to the public but I'm pumped and wanted to share with someone.  I'll probably need to buy more bandwidth because it takes a while to load the main image.

Actually you don't need to buy more bandwidth for the image to load faster you just need to optimize it for the web. What did you use to create the image?  Is there a Save For Web option or something that would let you reduce the resolution?  Also the orginal image is size is 444 X 444 pixels yet you are displaying it at 380 X 380 pixels by resizeing it via HTML.  This means the browser still has to download the large image even though you want to display it smaller.   Kind of hard to explain but bottom line is you need to optimize the image.

No it totally makes sense!

I'm a newbie at web design, but I really enjoy doing it (actually that's not entirely true, I've been doing it for years, but just off and on and never really getting beyond the bare basics).

Anyway, to answer the question, I made it in Fireworks.  I can't remember why I resized the image (I guess I just felt it was too big).  Maybe I should just resize it in Fireworks instead.

I was actually able to get it down to 176k which should load in 64 sec @ 28.8 Kbs (that is what dial up is normally).  You should be able to achieve the same in Fireworks.  I have Fireworks but don't use it much saving and exporting is more complicated I think in Fireworks.

I wish I had other sweet graphics programs but it's the only one I have a license for.  I bought it back before Adobe bought out Macromedia, so it's an old version.  I've never really messed around with exporting options.  Honestly, I hadn't ever thought about it!

Thanks for pointing that out, because now I'll look into it (and at the very least resize it to the the size I want it rather than having the html do that).

Thought I would mention not to forget to add your site to your profile so it shows up on each of your post. It'll be a little world icon like you see in my side info.