OK I have finalized my website (well, for me nothing is ever final…).
I had the initial intention to embed a photo/video gallery but finally decided to generate an album outside of the hype document and just link to it. I used jAlbum which generates quite some nice galleries. It works fine and the dark theme of the gallery seems to match with the theme of the website. I assumed that embedding an album would effect the loading time pretty much as well.
Loading time still takes a little while but I decided to leave “pre-load all images” on as the overall experience is so much better on the first visit. Those animations which start “on scene-load” wouldn’t be smooth enough otherwise or elements are missing, thus it wouldn’t look too good. Also, my website is actually one document with 9 scenes in it, so I believe all images of the 9 scenes are “pre-loaded.” Sure that will take a while.
In the future, I am planning to make another version of my website where I just break down the scenes into separate html files to reduce loading time.
I am working on my wifes website now and will share the link also once the draft revision is good to go. I am planning to use waypoints for some nice animated effects during scrolling. Thanks to Daniel for the waypoint tutorial (Viewport / Waypoint actions in Tumult Hype: Starting an animation when an element is visible) and @jakob for further guidance in this regard.