Dan and Andrew, thank you!
I am unfortunate in being unable to address many of your recommendations. Dan I knew it was going to be a slow loader given the heavy graphics nature of the site - but that's really all there is to it. I trimmed the images as much as I was willing to, but they're still large for dialup. And take away the graphics and there's about a page of information there... I guess I have to say I did that knowingly and I apologise for the slow performance.
Andrew, thanks for the grammatical stuff.
D) I probably have used that word too much but it's thematic and less potentially offensive to general people than alternatives I could think of. Even less cool, it's how I talk. I'll review and see if I can strip some of that out, your point is well taken.
But I'm really hampered in much of what you suggest by nature of having built the site from a template in iWeb. While the application has some nice features, being able to tweak the code isn't one of them. I cannot open the source on my own computer. (Using a Mac is a decent alternative to supporting unrepentant criminals, but Apple has an even more limiting proprietary approach than M$, in many ways. And the interface for every Linux distro ever made is just plain ugly. I've settled on using a Mac and am just living with it. For now.)
So whatever I name the page - Welcome or Home or whatever - is what gets put in the navigation across the top of the pages. You can imagine how much I fought that, trying to get page titles with meaning that wouldn't really clutter up the top nav... Same issue goes with meta tags - I can't make any because I don't have any control of the code. I searched through Apple's forums and help files on this and I'm not the only one who's having fits with that limitation. But no one else has found a way around it, either.
I will see about removing the spaces though. (Although that will mean starting the whole thing over from scratch - just the way iWeb works. You cannot rename a site once it's published, only make a new one...) I actually avoided using "Home" for the site's title just because it doesn't mean anything. This is an issue I've been fighting since I built the thing...and I still don't know how to handle it the best way. I allow myself the current slack because I really don't care whether it's visible in search engines - I'm not selling anything, it's just a place to point people to when I want to show something I made. These are largely all tradeoffs I made with my eyes open but I understand and agree with everything you said on the subject.
I really appreciate your input and will apply as much of it as possible, as soon as possible.
As for "armillaries."
That's a tough word, as it's spelled commonly with both one or two "l"s and I've never been able to find it plural. My dictionary doesn't have it either but I did Google it looking for an example. Google seems to lean toward two "l"s which is how I had it initially in the site but was told I was wrong... English. I guess this is worth more research as it's come up a couple of times already.
Armilary. But mine is way cooler, it's an alien armilary! I'm planning to get pictures of that soon and post it, as I'm inordinately proud of it. My first collaboration with Scott Ross. We built him one too.
Thanks for the input folks, it helps immensely. And unlike making something in steel that you can eventually "finish", a website is always a work in progress.
Anyway , you are one cool dude , I really like your work.Thanks for sharing with us :thumbup: 