Most of the bloggers adopt their blogs theme from Internet, but for web designers. You not only create a web site with astonishing graphics but also you need to consider the loading speed. A study shows that more than half of the visitors will your site, if it takes them more than 5 seconds to load. When it takes more than 10 seconds, I think at most 10% of the visitors will still have the patience.

So, the direct affect to your loading speed not only your server speed, also your web site size. You not only try to cut down the graphics using a higher compression like JPEG with lower quality. I mainly used 80% quality reserved; this will effectively reduce more than 50% of my picture size.

On the programming portion, you could also try to find a better algorithm on your php coding. On CSS files, you could cut some of the additional size by reducing excessive comments, e.g. using /* comments */ instead of using few paragraphs of comments. You also can save couples of lines by using 1 lines, e.g. margin: 0px 10px instead of separate them into margin-left, margin-right and etc.