I understand VSD doesn't use external style sheets...will this have an affect on the performance/speed of my site? (I know that it will make things harder for me to make updates to the site, but i'm just talking performance/speed wise...)

thanks...

Honestly, I don't think it will make much of difference if it's internal or external in regards to page load time. It's just text.

What you can do is make a copy of one of the html files on your site and change the CSS to an external CSS file and upload the files to your server. Then, check out the difference using one of the page load time sites on the net.

Here is one I grabbed from Google

http://tools.pingdom.com/