We have been working a ton of fixing the sluggishness that the site was experiencing. It is hard work diagnosing these things. Here is what we have done so far so you should notice an improvement in the time it takes to load pages.

Total page size has been reduced significantly by removing the rollovers which we will put back up once we fix this issue. The home page now clocks in at 886,551 bytes - down from 3.5MB - about 1/4 of the page size. I've also added GZIP compression to almost all the files being served by Apache, which also made a significant different.

Play around with it and let me know what you think. I've also started compressing certain files which were fairly large. As an example:

1. The background image bg_top.gif was 80KB - I compressed this to a
jpg

2. I compressed the prototype.js library

3. I compressed the SpryValidationTextField.js

I've looked around the site and many other files / images can be compressed similarly - such as all the images on the My Studio page so I will have my hands full this weekend but you should notice a difference.

If any of you can offer any other suggestions for things that we can do please let me know. This will help everyone especially me. Your expertise is greatly appreciated.

its good to hear thomas and i wouldn't say all sites would think that.

what are ways that we can randomly generate these thumbnails. At Cutcaster we have three rows of four thumbnails.  Would we just do a row of Random Images and have our backend randomly generate 4 random thumbnails each time you can to the site?

Let me know.  Like i said, I am all about testing things to see how they work and am not smart enough to know until I try them and see what the numbers say. 
Thanks
John

@ Lee.  I will try that.  Thanks for the tip.  I'll let you know what it does.

@borg  The your sales graph will be linked up to all pricing info and also your sales.  we wanted to portray the marketplace idea on the homepage.  soon we are going to link these graphs to your earnings and how your content's price moves up or down.