As the site opens/launches on my PC text flashes on top of the opening photo before disappearing. On my phone a photo flashes briefly when the site is launching.
this has to do with z index, right? but i don’t know where and how to change the z index setting. i right click and ‘inspect element’, but i just don’t know where to look.
No, this has to do with the fact that all of your images are positioned in the same spot (i.e., on top of each other), and they take a long time to load, so you see bits of each image before the subsequent image finishes loading.
You need to optimize those images. They’re between 160 and 275 KB right now, which is just absurd for an image that size. Once you get them to load in a reasonable amount of time, most or all of this should go away.