Nice site, Rulian.. here's my take on things:
- Your site does not validate.
Nor does you CSS (I used to use the css rule you are using, but took mine out so that it does validate.. no biggie I suppose).
In your footer, the current year is 00? "COPYRIGHT © 2008 — oo". I guess you would want to get PHP's date function to utilise 'Y' instead?
Are your using this (in part) as a tool for getting freelance work? Not sure if prospective clients care about actual resume info.. but would be nice to have a section dedicated to your knowledge / expertise, no? EDIT: This is especially useful for people who find you as opposed to you approaching them first with a resume copy in hand).
I am in agreement with Nog in that your header takes a huge amount of screen real estate. The problem here is that if you examine your photography section as an example, it doesn't take much till the user needs to scroll down to see more content, just by the nature of the incredibly thick header. Slimming things down would be advisable IMO.
Ok, this one is a big design flaw as far as I'm concerned. I noticed you need Javascript enabled to view other categories (which you already mentioned).. my opinion (despite what I am reading about most people having javascript enabled), don't design with the need for the user to have javascript enabled.. otherwise, those that don't wont be able to navigate your site. This also brings up bookmarking issues.. when javascript is enabled, many images occupy the same url.. so if someone wants to explicitly bookmark an image, best they can do is bookmark the general page it seems. My take is to design without the actual need of javascript.. as they say, javascript should 'enhance' a feature, not 'be' the feature itself.
I tend to be a performance whore. I examined your homepage within [URL="http://www.smu****.com/"]smush.it![/URL] (which is an an awesome web-based (firefox add-on) image compression utility that beats the living crap out of image editing programs. Developed by Yahoo, it can save you some memory without image quality degredation.
On the note of performance, you can reduce the amount of http request / response headers by resorting to CSS stylesheets.. Point in case.. I noticed your menu is graphic based. But each element (the star, the diamond, 'HOME', 'WEBSITE PROJECTS', etc..) are all separate graphics that could be merged into one (thus only requiring one http request / response header for the entire menu system). Not only that, it reduces bandwidth (not by huge amounts.. but it does save (that inconjunction with smush.it!). According to Yahoo, reduction in http headers is one of the highest methods in making websites more 'snappy / responsive'.
Overall, I do like it. Nice and clean.
Cheers,
NRG
