A faster website

How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression

Check out this article and give it a try for yourself.
I stumbled on this when I was reviewing my google developer dashboard for some of my sites. Google told me they were slow and i should consider this option to speed them up.

I did some looking and voila...google was right again!

With php, just add 2 lines of code to your webpages.
At the very top add this:
// start output buffering at the top of our script with this simple command
// we've added "ob_gzhandler" as a parameter of ob_start
<?php
if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')) ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); else ob_start();
?>

At the very bottom add this:
// end output buffering and send our HTML to the browser as a whole
ob_end_flush();

Just by doing this our webpages appear less choppy as they render.

Here is a complete article and direction on how to use this:
How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression

Another article:
http://dev-tips.com/featured/output-buffering-for-web-developers-a-beginners-guide

Website Image Gallery

I found a great image gallery add-on for website image galleries. It builds on the zoom-image idea which i was using a lot lately but provides a little more flexability and some themes to style the image boxes however you like.

The documentation provided on the site was quick and easy to use and I had a gallery set p in a few minutes.

Hope this helps: Rokbox
http://www.rocketwerx.com/products/rokbox/documentation