As a newbie as far as actual coding goes, I'm not nearly as efficient as I would like to be. Nor have I been able to work with all of the concepts that went down into my sketchbook while preparing this page... new ideas will be posted here while I am in the process of redoing the graphics for this site. Also, as I learn how to properly utilize things like style sheets (as opposed to the <SPAN STYLE> code for fonts) the pages should slim down. The same should happen, on a more dramatic level, as I work more with developing graphics specifically for the web. Because I have been strugling with physically formating the site, the graphics and layout have had to be brough down to the level of what I can do alone. I think I have managed to keep out my strongest pet pieves (frame traps, readability problems, annoying backgrounds) but I'm still not happy with what I have.
Places like Sonique's site obviously show, through the text colors, etc, that the coders started doing this with ANSI bulletin board graphics. This gives them a slick site with less than half of the download time this page has... Because I am a 33.6 dial-up net surfer, nothing bothers me more than slow sites heavy with unstable java-scripts... people don't stick around for that...
Anyway, as the status bar said, these are excuses and nobody wants to read a bunch of those so enough....