Hi Mya, Nick,
Thanks for the response and data. I am intending removing the image sizes that the site never uses once I have it clear which ones they are. Each image creates 17 different jpeg sizes in Shoutbox and I think I only use about 6 of them. Then I can regenerate the thumbnails and save some space on the server also.
I use pretty high quality jpegs also because they look much better (especially the larger sizes) but I can probably speed things up with a cache plugin which I haven't yet looked at. When you say 500k can be shaved off the images, what do you mean exactly?
The css file is big because I modified Shoutbox quite a bit. Also I use Typekit to keep the fonts consistent across mac and pc and that means resetting all the font specifications for all the different classes.
I have no idea how to set the server to use gzip. How would I do that?
I don't know about jQuery. I'm using the latest version of WP, so assume it uses the latest version, unless WP didn't install properly. But it seems to work, so I'm not sure.
Thanks for all your advice. I appreciate the effort you took in analyzing the site so thoroughly!
rich