Logos and Compression Effects = Ugly

I have spent all evening trying to design a logo - My first choice had to be ditched as it was 90kb in size AFTER compressing it and my second and third attempts weren't much better.

Point i'm making is that adding a logo with even small images seems to add up to just too large a filesize for dial up users.

I checked SEO out and it said my page loaded in 2 seconds - Thats fine for broadband users but not for those who don't have it.

So whats the answer ?

Compressing too much leads to ugly compression errors and it looks so bad...I have tried using both Adobe Photoshop 7 and Paint shop pro 8 and just cannot get a logo with images without a larger file size.

Anyone got any idea's or tips...I am going to look in the shops section and see how large the file sizes are for others but this is so hard to do.

My site is https://www.darkrealmfox.com/catalog if anyone wants to check and tell me what i could do better to get the jpg file size down.

Bear in mind i am not an expert and if there is advice can you make it really clear how to do something ( anything )

You might be better off saving the picture of the woman as a jpeg slice, and then the text/logo portion as a GIF and laying them out in a table in the header.

A GIF should have better compression and quality for the logo/background portion.

I've tried to use a shadow on text, but even with a very subtle one it increased the file size a whole lot.

Break the header up into pieces - the gradient background can be a tiny slice 1 pixel wide repeated across the width. The photo of the girl as a jpeg the text as a gif and your text should be real text. When you get done the whole thing should be no more than 15k.

My problem is i don't know how to separate the elements and do all that.

I guess i will be reading up on that later though and may attempt it.

I tried putting a banner with the logo in it works but too much space to fill below it.

Also my stylesheet seems to have somehow turned into a fluid one despite the fact i didn't alter any file i'm aware of.

oh well fluid is good and i hope its not just my eyes deceiving me.