Well, if you think you can manage it, I say go ahead and do the dual sites.
About the pictures: I know most people do it out of ignorance. They think that because of the pictures are on the net, an it doesn’t have a copyright sign they are free for the taking. You’d be surprised to find out that even people in the publishing industry seem utterly ignorant of copyright issues and some times just don’t pay attention to it.
Well I guess I’ll start on an underconstruction page.
What should I do differently so my new site (the low bandwidth version) is more search engine friendly? Just get lots more text in it?
If you want to research this yourself, the term you want to look for is ‘search engine optimization’ (SEO).
It’s not an exact science, but in general, here are some guidelines:
Decide what keyword(s) you want to target. If people search for those words, you want your site to be found.
Try and use your keyword in the title of your page.
Add META keywords and descriptions.
Use ALT tags on your images and try and use your keyword in the tag.
Validate the HTML. Validation errors might prevent your site from being searched properly.
You can validate your code from here:
HTML validator
Provide outgoing links from your site. The more sites your’s links to, the better.
Get other sites to link to yours.
Add a site map. This helps the search-engine crawler navigate your complete site.
Much thanks all, you’ve been very helpful.
There were a couple of attempts at setting up a standard for this, and both more or less flopped.
Fonts are not freely distributable - most folks aren’t aware of it, but fonts are copyrighted just like everything else under the sun. Distributing a copy of a font you bought can get you in hot water. That was part of the reason the font embedding systems flopped. The system had to let the viewer’s browser show the text in the proper font but without giving the user a copy of the font that could be used for anything else.
Along with that was the usual Microsoft “Standard” vs. true open Standards that just turned into a mess that never got resolved. You can create embeddable fonts that will display on IE, and if you dig long enough you may find the tools to let you do it for Netscape and maybe Mozilla. It is just a huge mess, though.
I like the way your page looks. Let’s get that straight.
You page does break every rule there is for standard HTML and for usability.
Take a look at the css zengarden and see what can be done with standard comform html.
You’ve got graphical talent and some understanding of the technical side. If you can improve the technical side, you can go from making cool sites to making good cool sites.
I envy you your graphical talents.
I don’t think you have to worry about losing your formatting. Your page is layed out using tables, so all you have to do is stick the iframe into your center panel (instead of your big text graphic) and specify the appropriate size in the iframe tag. The source for your iframe is a seperate html page with its all its own formatting; though appropriately chosen to match your main page.
Of course you could skip the iframe altogether and go with a text area. Here are two examples:
http://www.websitetips.com/info/css/scrollbars.shtml
These two options leave you with a lot of artistic freedom to play around with the look of the scroll area.
What I’m trying to get at is that you can replace that text graphic with actual text while still keeping your layout the same.
That is COOL! CSS is the dope, once you get the hang of it.
I’m trying to convert all of our intranet sites to CSS, but ‘I’m only an egg’.
World Eater, you do have a graphically terrific site; I’m another one that wishes I had your graphics talent. Dual sites would do what you want, if you don’t mind maintaining them.
But I think you’d be amazed at what you can do with standard HTML & CSS. On the other hand, if you’re not really interested in learning those, then you’re not.
Good luck!
Good explanation, I’m sad to admit the font copyright never even dawned on me.
Yeah, it’s definitely as ineligant as it gets.
Yowza! Very cool.
I really appreciate the kind words. 
Yeah I think I see what you’re going for. Probably what I’ll do is work on the “correctly done” site first. That way I can pick up some skills on how to do things the right way 
, and then I’ll use what I’ve learned to optimize the other site.
Good advice on the scroll stuff in the middle.
Once again, I really appreciate the nice words, you guys have made my day.
Right now, I’m thinking about the dual, but I’m starting on the proper site first.
I’ve dabbled around with CSS before, but I never knew you could do the kind of stuff I’ve seen (or wasnt’ aware it was CSS when I saw it) here, so it’s a good inspiration.
Same to you converting that stuff.
I’ll have plenty of questions during this process, so I’ll need a little help from you guys. The first round is on me btw.
I like your music. I really like the gal’s voice and the production. I’d thicken up the low end personally, but maybe that’s just me.
Thanks, we try our best to make good stuff. I think you lose some bottom when you convert to mp3, but who knows, maybe my hearing is going bad.
Ok I have 2 website questions.
From my understanding spammers can “harvest” my email from the text on my site. Is there anything I can do protect myself?
I plan to tile (or stack I guess) a background image. Will I be ok in all browsers or are there any pitfalls to concern myself with?
Btw, I’ll only be asking questions, that I can’t find the answers to myself beforehand.
Whoops, one more. Regarding popups. If I have a page with thumbnails of pictures, is it wise to make the actual picture popup, or will the popup get killed and no one will see the picture?
I would think that a popup killer would go “well this is a pop up from the site I’m already browsing, let it go through. This one is from outside, kill it”
Integrated popup blockers (Mozilla and friends) won’t have any trouble at all, since the user has to click on the thumbnail to get the popup with the fullsize image. External blockers may have trouble if they don’t keep track of what goes out as well as what comes in.
One way to protect your email address is with javascript. For an example, go here view source, and search for ‘protected email script’ You will see the javascript required to do it.
Any popup blockers I’ve ever used don’t distinguish between inside or outside generated popups. They will just block them, unless the user specifically allows popups for the whole site. So yes, if you display your picts with a popup it’s likely a lot of users won’t see it.
Good stuff guys, thanks.
Another question. I’ve made a top graphic, then I’ll be filling the middle with a tiled background slice, then I’ll need the “bottom cap graphic”
Any suggestions on the easiest way to do this?
You could do this using a table consisting of a column divided into three rows. Put your top graphic in the top cell and your bottom graphic in the bottom cell. Then your middle cell, you can set the background image of the cell as the tile graphic. This should do what want.
One “cheap” way of doing this is to use a web-only email address. Ie, get yourself another email address which you use exclusively on your website, and one you use exclusively for friends, family, business, etc. This won’t stop spam, but it will provide a nice way to keep your imporant email seperate from your spam-filled website email.
That’s the way I’ll go. How will I load new webpages into the middle though? So right now in the top cell is the header graphic, with a small imagemap for buttons. When I click on the news button, how do I get it to load in the middle table? I thought I could only do that with frames.
Hmm, well I have 10,000 @subtechbeats.com addys I guess I could spare a few for the cause.
I see what you’re getting at. Just fill the middle cell with an iframe; the source for the iframe will be whatever you want to display in that middle cell.
If you want to use buttons on the main page to change the contents of the iframe you’ll have to use some javascript. A clever idea might be to not include the navigation buttons in the top cell but rather include them as part of the iframe source.
What’s funny is this is what I did on my current one, and I totally forgot to do that. I’m good at the graphics, because I don’t have to remember. All this other stuff goes in my head and right out.
Here’s what I have so far. I would take your suggestion, but the mune has a gradient behind it, and I don’t want any seem to show if I split it up. You can see that I just need to take a 1 or 2 pixel line of the blue and tile the hell out of it.