That overall theme of that logo is really good, needs a couple of tweaks but otherwise I think you may finally have it. For what it's worth, I went through four or five logo revisions before I settled on one I liked.
Hmmm - my wife hates it and I thought it was OK - she seemed to think it looked like a naked baby - bit disturbing!
I see you've made a new image view page too, however it is still force downloading the image rather than just displaying full size, which may be why users are leaving prematurely.
Now here I'm puzzled. Yes I have re-done the css to match, but when you say 'force downloading', isn't the page you click on meant to download the image? Just to clarify, I don't (can't) store every full-size image due to bandwidth/memory limits, so all these are shown through an iframe link to the original. The iframe is just to re-size to a comfortable all-image view for some browsers (not chrome or IE). I could use the GD library to re-create a smaller image, but this too is going to eat into my bandwidth. My only other option is to display the thumb again, although this would personally annoy me as a user.
Also, you'll want to sort out the word wrap in the 'View website' button, as for some urls it overflows; I believe there is a CSS property that fixes precisely this.
I tried the obvious overflow:hidden method with little success (in chrome but works in FF), but have managed to integrate the php wordwrap() reasonably.
Another little UI quirk: do you keep a reference to the size of the images in the database? If so, you could preset the images size in the page source so that they aren't little squares whilst the images are still downloading, that then reflow every time a single image loads.
Another interesting point. I would love to store the filesize, but haven't yet successfully managed it. The filesize() function doesn't access external files and seems to be a bit buggy. Without opening the file and reading content bytes, I'm not sure how to go about this. The crawler is already pretty slow and I don't realy want to slow it down further.
I've googled till my fingers bleed but still no concise answer. I'll post on the programming help in addition to this.
As for the resizing, do you have a live copy I can look at? Perhaps I'll be able to shed some light on the issues.
The test file I'm working on is on a stick that's at work - I'll bring it in a upload it.
Never underestimate the power of good design; if you are willing to put the work in to create something beautiful then they will keep coming back for more. As I noted above, the bounce rate increase could be due to the forced download, although the bounce rate is not necessarily always a good metric to use.
I'm certainly willing to put in the effort, as you might have gathered. I'm obviously not a professional web designer but effort pays!
I've also noticed the number of recent images increasing (uses a time threshold as a cut off), so users so obviously prefer the UI.
Interesting to note that not many others are commenting. I guess it's gonna be a design by me and you!
