Advice on redesigns - personal & commercial

Hi Guys,

I need some advise on a couple of sites, one personal and two business.

This is a personal page I did for a friend for his poetry some time ago. 
I love the background graphic on the homepage, but it is huge (39K) and 
takes an age to load. The subsequent pages with the poems on them are 
even bigger! 300+K and take minutes to load.  I first did this page when 
I knew next to nothing about graphics or html, the text of the poems is 
part of the graphic itself. I don't know a hell of a lot more now! 
*laugh* but, I want to redesign the page but still use the same graphic 
for the background. I've played around with tables and optimizing the 
graphic but I can't come up with anything suitable. 
Please, someone take the time to let it load and have a look at it. I'm 
running out of ideas.

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/1309/hawkepoems.html

Next!  My company is merging with another and our two quite different 
internet sites are going to need to be merged. I have not been involved 
with the creation of either of them but am reponsible for the 
maintenance of one.  I am going to apply for the position of Webmaster, 
Site Administrator, Geek with no life! *laugh* whatever you want to call 
it, in the new merged company, and the first order of that job will be 
to merge the two sites into one.

I'm not going to give my personal opinion of either site, but am very 
interested to hear your ideas.

http://www.universal-australia.com.au/index.boa
http://www.polygram.com.au/

Feel free to email me off the list with any comments or suggestions on 
these sites.

Thanks,
Lileth


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