are there any good tools out there that will tell me how long the front page of my website takes to load ( in seconds) ??
Simply use this firefox plugin tool, FasterFox, which can be found here: http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/ (Just copy and paste the link because I do not have the right permissions necessary to post a live link yet). It will provide you with a loading time accuracy up to a millisecond. Enjoy
This service shows your page load time from several different points in the world: internetsupervision.com