Thanks Chris!
I appreciate your appreciation. <g> It is not often that cirticisms are well received. I'm just grateful that my comments have not started any flame wars, so far.
The enter page is probably not necessary. I have debated about what should be the entry page - I wanted the entry page to be images of some sort but I didn't want users to start at the portfolio page because it has a different look and feel from the rest of the site. I decided I'd go with the blog because I figured that would be the page updated most frequently (although not very frequently apparently) but other than that it was a mostly arbitrary decision.
Yes, a home page is extremely important in many regards and should be given special attention. For this reason, a home page's layout can be different from the other pages. In many cases, an Enter page, on the other hand, is nothing more than an extra click.
Any font/rollover color differences in the main site are not intended...I will take a look. I think consistency is important but I have a lot of extras in my css which has caused some problems finding things ;-) Thanks for pointing it out.
Consistency is very important. If there is inconsistency, a viewer (like me) would wonder does the inconsistency mean something.
The space between the bottom of the page content and the footer (links, etc) is extremely difficult to get right - I spent probably two days trying to get it right...to no avail obviously. You're right though, the intent was for them to be just below the content if it was larger than a page or if it was smaller than the full window I wanted it sitting at the bottom to fill the page but not require vertical scrolling.
I am quite surprised that you find it difficult to control the space size. From my reading, if the page is laid out in css blocks, controlling the spacing within each block or between blocks should not be that big a deal. To really minimize the vertical scrolling on this page, why not get rid of these bottom links and incorporate them as menu buttons at the top? That way, the navigation is centralized. Too birds with one stone.
The gallery size is intentional because I didn't want to handle a large gallery!! I think I would have to make the thumbnails smaller to keep it well contained. I used larger thumbnails because I didn't want images so small that they were useless as far as a preview is concerned. Ultimately I may go with the no thumbnail approach like Autoviewer but there again keeping the gallery size in check is important.
As you may have noticed in my critiques on different sites, I am trying to solve this problem of how to manage and navigate a LARGE gallery with many thumbnails and displaying an enlargement on a single page. The thumbnail size, the number of thumbnails, how many to displayon a page, how to navigate between them, etc. all come into play. Size does matter, when it comes to galleries.
The image overlay is javascript. There's a library called "lightbox" and I integrated that as part of the gallery management. I didn't attempt to change anything within the library so the behavior is default.
One more thing regarding sizing, etc, I saw a question earlier about it...I use some javascript to check the resolution of the users browser and then load one of two different style sheets depending on whether it is greater or less than 1024x768. While it's not perfect, it does give me some flexibility for those of us who like to use 1280+ so I can size parts of the page differently. It doesn't do anything to the thumbnail size (yet...) but it keeps the overall site size appropriate for the browser window. I'll be glad to share if someone is interested.
How to deal with different monitor/widow sizes and resolutions at the viewers' end is an important consideration. I would like to know how this approach work, and what are the pros and cons. Please keep us updated on your findings.
Thanks again for taking the time to comment on the site!
You're doing a great job!
You are more than welcome, and thanks for the civility.
