[cperciva]

say you have a default home page that is roughly half a meg in size, which when you account for all of the doohikies in the Web 2.0 era, is not totally out of the question

Don't forget about caching. The first time someone comes to your multimedia-bloated website he might need to download 500 kB, but as long as you don't screw up too badly future visits will require far less traffic.

[potatofish]

This is a good point. I was wondering about it, things have changed since I did web development back in the late 90's. Has caching changed much? When you say "screw up", is there any thing I should look to avoid doing? Maybe this is also a good time to ask, what is a reasonable size for a main page, and pages beneath it? I see some really big page sizes almost everywhere I look. Small pages seem to be the exception, not the norm these days. Isn't that the whole point of Web 2.0? To deliver near desktop like experiences, or better?