The Web, primarily, is a means of communication. I believe that the home page of any site should load quickly and convey immediately what the site is about, so that anyone coming to it can decide whether he wants to continue further or go elsewhere. I object to waiting several minutes for a home page to download, wasting time and perhaps money, and then having to scan a hotchpotch of images and logos to find out whether anything is relevant to my interest and where to go for it. Some sites take so long for the first page to arrive that I have aborted the visit and my interest in it before it is complete. Site maintainers also seem to forget that many of their prospective visitors do not have the latest technology. They make no provision for those users with small screens, slow machines and obsolescent browsers. There are many of them. The EFDSS had, at one time a database which could only be accessed by PC-users. Mac and unix based users could not enter. This is contrary to the whole ethos of HTML and the Web which was intended to be platform independent.
Since writing the above I have moved to a high-speed Broadband connection but even now I can be plagued by load-time problems. Many others may be even less fortunate and my comments remain still valid.