ON your old site:
- preload image rollovers so that they don't "flicker" as you mouse over them (this will be particularly bad for your dial-up users too)
- I'd put your section buttons in a CSS driven unordered list to adhere to the semantic web thing, and ditch your tables for this purpose. In fact, this entire design could be managed without tables.
- load all of your javascript from an external file, rather than including it inline. This might speed up your page loads. I'd imagine your page loads are already pretty slow due to that QT movie.
new design:
How come the background for "photo blog" looks a little different?
Very nice, overall....