I would just want to take 5 minutes in order to invite you to the new version of Lombergar.com (http://www.lombergar.com) that was released today. Version 5 now holds a very different design that the previous versions, trying to achieve a more professional look that it's predecessors.

New code improvements have also enabled me to be much more free as far as the design is concerned so the index for example carries a completely different design than the sub sites.

The menu problem (a lot of people have complained about a very difficult navigation) has now been solved as well, especially judging from the current feedback I have recieved.

This version also brings the departure of the topsite (http://www.lombergar.com/topsite/) and spamfighter (http://www.lombergar.com/spamfighter/) from the main website ... thus becoming separate sites and not interfering with the main site's objective. The latter is now more print-oriented than the previous versions and that was one of my goals for version 5.

Anyways, the new version has also brought some new sub sites like an ebay listing and a games section as well as a completely new part of the system which will be released on January 31st.

http://www.lombergar.com/images/v5.jpg (http://www.lombergar.com)

I would appreciate any critique about the site's overall feel, design, color choice, content, anything that comes to mind will really help.

Thanks in advance!

Thats great! Very unique.

I would resample the thumbails along the top to the size they are being displayed in. THis would reduce their file size, as well as make them look smoother.

Also shaving off 50 pixels in the width would prevent horizontal scrolling at 800x600.

Nice work.

Thank you.

I am thinking of addding even more width of the site, it just gives more space than I ever had before ... and the 800x600 users have a really small percentage of visits on my site.

Can't resize the thumbs though ... it's a coppermine issue. They are made one size and that's the size displayed on the portfolio itself. The newest listing is real time taken from the mysql database, it's not static.

Your art is very nice.
The full-sized images that are linked to your thumbnails downloaded rather slow over my 56k modem. I tried recompressing some just for grins and found that I can get as much as an additional 90% compression without discernible degration to my eyes. I tried with JPEGCruncher Pro 2.0.

Way to bring up an old thread!

tstud, I am the last person to stick up for slow download speeds, trust me. However, when it comes to artwork, I can see why an artist would choose very high quality jpegs for their enlarged thumbnails despite long download speeds. It is their art, and they may notice the few pixels that are lost or distorted by the jpeg lossy compression, even though another viewer might not.

In my experience it is also ok to make a person wait once they have opted in to a download. The thumbnail/enlarged version is a perfect example. A person can quickly view the thumbnail, and opt-in to and wait for the high resolution version.

Unfortunately low bandwidth limits your ability to appreciate art, because most art forms are bandwidth hogs. Images, Music, and Video all require a lot of bandwidth. Written expression is the exception to this.

It's also a personal site, so you can drop all known web design conventions out of the window.

Don't get me wrong however, when it comes to business oriented websites, I'm all about fast pages.

Hehe, well said. You got the exact point, in most images I will see the JPEG artifacts very soon after the compression starts and it sometimes hurts to see that. You also have to take into consideration that these are 60x45 cm images mostly and so its sometimes hard to see the hard worked detail go away with compression.

Anyways, thanks for the comments :)