wow, its that bad, huh?
I am going to pick up that book in a few hours... I was hopeing for you tweaks and you deflated my ego....
I don't mean to deflate your ego, its a good first start. Kudos for you trying to take it on yourself when others have failed. With a little good learning materials and practice it should turn out fine. In the end, as long as your happy with it and it generates enough leads to pay for your time, hosting and registration fees then it is a success.
When it comes to detailing, even though I know I can do as good a job as many that call themselves pro's, I am still just an enthusiast and no matter how often I am asked, I don't touch other peoples cars. My cars look good to me and even though I am usually happy with the results, I am not always happy with the time invested (I work very slowly). Any good detailer would be quick to point out my flaws and it is no different with websites. I've been doing websites for 15+ years and have been the lead on sites costing 100's of thousands and it becomes quite easy to spot amateur or diy sites.
Unless there is a good reason to do so the homepage should never be more than 100K, 1.5MB is way to big. That seems really small, given the high presence of broadband, but truth of the matter is, there are still plenty of users on dialup (my dad just signed up for dialup last week), and what about the users on mobile devices such as winmobile, blackberry, androids or iphones? iphone is actually the 4th most popular device on the internet today. 100K is very obtainable with some smart decisions.
I still try to make sure that sites work in 800x600, but thats a small group these days. 1024x768 is a much more reasonable target however your header image is 1044 so it requries scrolling for a lot of your users. 15" laptops are pretty common and that is their native resolution, many people over 40 (you know, they guys with the cash to buy the ferarris in your pics) use low resolutions even on larger big flat screens because they cant the small text as well). A separate mobile site is out of question but mobile devices will have less scrolling if you keep it in those size constraints. Almost 40% of users today are at 1024x768 the most common resolution by a large shot.
Every page needs to have a descriptive title, not 'a' or 'sm', that is the name that shows up in the browser, bookmarks and search results. While on the topic of search results, each page needs to have it's own description meta tag (many are missing), this is the short blurb that will show in search results, also the keywords 'Wide, Huge, C0ck' are probably not going to attract the right customers. Sign up for the free google webmaster tools and keep an eye on your keywords so you can target them for better results.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard
The first thing every new web person does is change the background color or image and text color. Really, there is no good reason to do this and the contrast is hard on viewers eyes. Write down a list of your 10 favorite websites, now how many of them stray away from black text on a white background? I can tell you none of the top 10 websites in the world and for good reason.
It's going to be hard at first, but ditch the images with the stone borders and text overlays, a bulleted list with maybe short descriptions will be much more effective. The text is hard to read and you can't see the image detail anyhow. This will make a major impact on the user experience (faster loading, easier viewing, less vertical scrolling).
CSS also will help to keep the filesize down and will make the pages render much quicker. It will also help make your maintenence much easier, granted css is not the easiest to understand for a lot of people. A table should only be used to display tabular data, not for page layout and design. The book I suggested will give you a descent start, but if you want to have control of your site, definately research this topic further.
You will also learn about the differences and benefits of XHTML as opposed to HTML, and as a final step before uploading the pages to yahoo, run them through the W3C validator, this is a simple step that will go a long way in ensuring your site looks the same for all visitors.
The W3C Markup Validation Service
I am very glad to see that you have redundant navigation and that javascript is not required to get from page to page. If you do use javascript and/or flash, make sure that you provide alternative means of navigating the site. I browse with both disabled by default, in fact, i only have 1 computer with flash installed.
