Magento assistance

Magento assistance I am the lone administrator for a small E-commerce website. The site is up and running using Magento CE 1.9.2.3 with all the latest security patches, including 6788. I’ve been trying to do everything myself and learning as I go. Before developing a major marketing campaign to attract visitors to the site, I would like to make some improvements to the site. Due to the company’s size, we’ve been using free templates and free extensions so far. I am currently using the mobileshoppe theme but would like to switch to the Template Monster Fit Body theme [login to view URL] I installed the theme and it was working fairly fast but I didn’t have the demo slider or other demo features. I tried installing other sliders but none worked. Then I noticed that the theme started to have a VERY slow scroll (in Chrome and Firefox) and the images don’t appear on the category pages. I switched back to the mobileshoppe theme and the scroll and category images were fine. I tried to remove all the Fit Body theme files and reinstall but to no avail. I’ve cleared Magento Cache, Reindexed and other tasks but nothing. I contacted Template Monster and they don’t give support to free templates. They did mention however that the slider and other demo features are static blocks included with the download. I have the phtml files but not sure what to do with them to get them to appear on the homepage. (Of course if the slow scrolling and category image problems aren’t fixed, this doesn’t matter at all because I won’t use this theme.) I have also added the permissions to blocks in the admin as recommended after patch 6788. I also want to speed up the site in general for SEO purposes and tried Magento’s merge JS and CSS but it didn’t seem to help. There are also some HTML validation errors according to W3C validator. I noticed that there are large image sizes on the site which probably slows down the site. I will be fixing this in the next few weeks. Here is a list of the issues I would like done. IMPORTANT: If you fix any of these, I need to know a step-by-step procedure of what you did so 1) I can fix in the future if necessary, and 2) I continue to learn. 1. Fix Fit Body theme slow scroll and category images that don’t appear. 2. If #1 gets fixed, install static blocks that came with the theme including slider. 3. If the theme gets fixed or not, I need category products to appear on the homepage. I have already set this up (admin CMS menu) and it was working fine. However, a few months ago it stopped working. I thought it might be because of the blocks permissions after 6788 but I added the blocks. I was able to get NEW products to appear on the homepage but not categories. 4. Check and fix HTML validation errors. 5. Merge and Minify JS and CSS, HTML.