Another popular technique is to divide the page into three columns instead of having it all go straight down. Put main sections in the left-hand column, the main graphic and the meat of the page in the middle, and any extras on the right side. Unless you have a good reason, all your tables should have a border of 0 - no table should have a border unless you really want to seperate the contents into little boxes. Small Load Time Big graphics are not quite as cool as they seem. While they may light up your screen, they may slow other users load time down to a crawl.
Large graphics can still be small, though.
Most of those drawings use only about four colors, so you can save them in GIF format with a small file size. For photographs, use JPEG compression, and use them sparingly. Smaller icons with fewer colors look better and load faster. As for icons, make sure they all look somewhat the same - haphazard graphics make for a confusing page. Important People don't come to your page to visit your Yahoo link - they want content, information, and new things.