6
I'd start off with analysing your pages with something like
Web Page Analyser to see which areas of your site are bloated. There are a lot of images, perhaps reducing the number of news items would help, plus reducing the actual amount of text shown on the front page. Maybe even paginating articles at smaller intervals.
The site looks good, but are things like the background image really necessary?
It also looks like you're pulling in ads which will create delays.
I suggest you have a play around and see what works best as a compromise for you. At present your home page is over 700k, which in web terms is huge. If you can get it down to 100k (even this is quite large) it would be a lot better for people still on dial up, otherwise they'll just give up.
