>what am I able to do about the load speeds of the site, is there a better
>way to display information eg- via a database instead of htm files to
>reduce http requests?
First of all what kind of hosting do you have? Paid? Free?
Are you on a Linux server or Windows?
I don't think you would see an improvement in speed by switching over to a database vs .html files - so from a speed stand point I say no improvement there.
>will your website receive more hits with a .com domain?
No it doesn't matter - your website site will receive as many hits as your marketing efforts permit - it's all in marketing - the fact that it is a .com or not, does not matter.
BTW what is your domain type if it isn't .com?
>is there a way i am able to change from html to php to increase speed
>or change to another language?
You already asked this - my comment was no, I don't think this would make any difference.
>i pretty much would like to know anything that would improve the load
>time of each page on my site either drastically or the smallest change
>without paying a great deal on web hosting or hardware.
Since we don't know if you are using a free service or a paid service I will say this: to increase the speed of a page loading, it needs to be as small as possible. Mainly this means go easy on the graphics.
If you're using a free service you're most likely hosed. They have no incentive to help you speed up your site and being a free hosting service they have crammed as many websites onto one server as possible.
You can get a professional website for as little as 2.95/mo with the performance you are looking for and with people who care about the performance - you are obviously very unhappy with the performance of your current hosting service. I have a couple of sites with 1849webhosting.com and I'm very pleased with them - I have one shared and one VPS hosting plan with them.
>also i have set up a series of meta tags on my index page, do i require meta >tags only on the index page or throughout the whole site? how does this >work?
Meta tags should be on each web page - google around for tutorials on how to sue meta tags.
>Is there software out there that is able to detect broken links for me. my >site is getting huge and i`m the only one running it.
Getting huge in what sense? Number of users? Huge in disk space? bandwidth?
Yes, there is software to detect broken links - again, google around to see what is there.
You may also be interested in our free website monitoring service.
>i have looked at joomla and the way they use a database to display >information - this looks cool - is this only for convienience or for productive >reasons?
Productive reasons. They use a database so that they can, among other things, have different users login and update content on a website. Joomla is a very cool product and it's free.