Ideas straight from my design class -
If you feel the need to animate the loading sequence, then the loading sequence is too long (Are you using Flash? It crashes browsers and is on its way out anyway). Also, please don't center text. A phone will do that for you, and it doesn't look good on a website. Left-justify only, please.
The site didn't come up on my phone at all. I just get a blank screen. I looked at
your theme's information, and they show compatibility with browsers but not with phones. No matter that it says it's responsive; it just doesn't seem to be responsive in practice. Can you get it on a friend's phone? Try several phones, several types. Here's
another theme that same company makes; it might be a better fit for phones.
You can use
Screenfly to test resolution on various sized devices, but that doesn't tell you whether a site loads at all.
I also clicked around; a few of the pages link to 404 (http://carysbeard.wix.com/designer and
http://cargocollective.com/nayantarakotian/Arpana-Productions are two) or to older sites (http://mrhg2.user.srcf.net/index.html and
http://www.williamcole.co.uk/ are two) which are unresponsive to changes in screen size. Your group would do well to update their sites and add responsive themes so their work looks good on mobile. WordPress does this extremely well (although as you can see some themes work better than others) and will also help a bit with SEO.
Speaking of SEO, if you are planning on blogging, use the Yoast plugin for SEO.
Anyway, image-heavy sites are slow, as you already know. And make sure to design for mobile. There are a lot of people whose
only means of getting on the Internet is via their phones.
Hope this helps! The graphics are lovely and very clean. Maybe scale them down to save on load time?