Rejiggered my homepage, opinions?

I really appreciate all the comments and you all taking the time, thanks :)
I think what I will try is to replace the thumbs with thumb sized images (more work, bleh) for quicker off-the-bat loading, then try to use lightbox (or maybe play with this piclens thing) for the main image display. The trouble is that the click event for the funky nav is handled within the javascript for the galleria, so will have to do some butcherin!
 
I like the overall impression of the site, so it's definitely a good start. Have you considered going more down the line of albums specific to different types of photography, as at the moment, there's a pretty random jumble of images pretty much in no way linked together?

I agree about the loading times. I've got a realised 8Mb line here and it's not the fasting thing going (but it's not the slowest either), so is going to be pretty slow for lots of others. In FF, if you move your mouse too fast over the thumbnails at the bottom, it can't actually keep up and you get images lighting up a few seconds after you've moved over them, missing out ones in between. That really isn't great and I'm on a Q6600 with 2gb of RAM.

I don't see a problem with not having all of the thumbnails on the screen at once. Even if you did make the image smaller and/or the space above and below smaller, I take it you'll be adding more over the coming months anyway, so there's no point. I do agree that you shouldn't have to scroll up once you've selected a thumbnail, though. That could always be combatted with a horizontal scrolling bar of thumbnails, which could look quite nice if you could integrate it with the js you've got already.
 
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I've written my own version of the fading routine now, so I'll be able to get rid of the galleria altogether and use lightbox, which means I can have the nav as pretty much the whole page and not worry about where the image shows :) Hopefully the fading will be more efficient since its so much less code doing it this way... time will tell.
Thanks for the opinions, its very helpful :)
 
I have just finished remaking it from scratch. I've written the fading stuff myself along with some other fun (a timed fade in and out of a random picture in the block of thumbs every 5secs or so, just to keep it interesting).
And I've used lightbox.
Hopefully someone will like this one even a teeny bit :p
Please let me know your thoughts :)

http://www.tiltedsky.net/ (if you looked at this earlier, please reload with ctrl+f5 to clear the image cache, as the full size pics have changed, but not changed name).

IE wont run the email link, which is nice... will look at that later.
 
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My thoughts now would be that you don't really need 'TILTEDSKY PHOTOGRAPHY' under the images, as it's at the top in a nicer font already and it's basically the first thing in the bit of text at the bottom. That re-wording of the text is much better. I like the random selection of the thumbs, I think it's a nice touch, but defaulting the thumbs to the darker shade makes them a bit difficult to see in comparison to how they're meant to be and doesn't show them off nicely. Perhaps change it so that the selected one is dark and the rest light, or all light and the selected one gets a border or an outer glow or something? Perhaps there could also be a bit more space between thumbs?

Overall it looks much better, though - pretty slick. The lightbox is much better and I like the design of the page in general.

// EDIT // The image highlighted randomly stays highlighted even when you mouse-over a different image of the bunch. I'd change that.
 
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I'm with MK on the uniform grid, I'm not a fan of the random distribution. I also don't like the typeface your header is in. Take a look at my site (click my sig) to see square thumbs in a grid.

I really like the time delayed fade with mouse-over and the text at the bottom makes a lot more sense now. :)

Panzer
 
Much better :)

Although the title of your web site just doesnt seem to stand out at all. Maybe light it up all the time or a more bold font?

Other than that, its coming on a treat, keep up the good work.
 
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