The bottom line is to put yourself in the visitors place and make sure you can get to all the important areas in your site. The time it takes for your pages to load into the visitors browser, will determine whether they wait or leave. If it takes any longer than 30 or 40 seconds for a page to load many people lose interest and move on to other sites. There are many factors which influence how fast a web page displays, not the least of which is the total file size of the page. One way to make your pages load faster is to limit your use of graphics.
Page size is determined by adding up the file sizes of all the graphics and text on the page.
Try to keep your entry level pages under 30K and all other pages 70K or less. This will allow visitors to decide whether they want to see the full size version and also lets the rest of your page content load quickly. While you may think they are interesting to look at, the person with slower connections to the internet will wait unnecessarily for them to load into the browser. Many times a page will not load until these animation's are done loading and visitors move on to faster web sites. This means no distracting tiled background images, and also choosing a text color which contrasts well with the page background.