Might be worth grabbing a passing artist with a copy of photoshop or Gimp to give the artwork and background images a more glossy look or metallic sheen. Never hurts to try and swap favours over at 'Worth1000.com' or 'deviantart.com' as artists make lousy web designers and vice versa.
Slow initial loading of the splash intro page stems from trying to use an 800x600 image with a file size of 194Kb.. alas no easy fix for that. There are three things that could be done, one is fairly simple the others are more involved needing some serious image editing, CSS and slicing.
1. Use a low resolution black and white image with the
lowsrc attribute, this will load quickly before the main image giving visitors something to look at while the colour image arrives.
Code:
<img src="splash_colour.gif" width="800px" height="600px" lowsrc="splash_plain.gif" />