Getting rid of the pointy hand helped alot. The cartoon figure is fine, especially if he's a 'trademark'.
I have currently have three monitors in my computer room. Two 19" and one 14". I looked at your site on one 19" at 1152x864 using IE 6.0. The homepage is almost perfectly centered on the screen. The "last updated" text is about an inch above the bottom of the screen. I have some javascript that you could use to move the bottom menu up and down on the page to keep it visible when the page is short enough. That's probably not the case on a lot of your pages tho. You can see it at work on the homepage of "www.huskerswhobelieve.com" (tho I noted that I need to adjust it). As I change the content of that page, the javascript moves the DIV that the bottom menu is in so that it'll display at the bottom of the page as long as the page isn't too long. So even if I emptied the page, the bottom menu would be at the bottom of the page.
My linux computer also has a 19" monitor at the same resolution. I looked at the site with Mozilla 5.0 and it looks exactly the same on linux/mozilla as it does windows/IE. Thats a good job! Linux people will appreciate that. It appears that you are using "font size" number (font size="3"). I've never used those. I used to specify the font size as 'pt'. I recently discovered that by using 'px' for font size, the text is roughly the same size in both mozilla and IE, while that's not true for 'pt'.
The 14" monitor is on a Windows machine with IE 6 at 800x600. The home page shows up fairly nicely there. The white "The Artwork.." logo barely shows up without scrolling.
It appears that you designed most of your pages to fit an 800x600 resolution and be centered. That's what I've done lately, tho I've done Javascript lately to reposition the DIVs so I'll have to look at if your approach will work on my HWB see. The HWB site annoyingly shifts the page to center and you see it move almost every time you change pages. I haven't paid as much attention as I should on my sites, but I think that your home page could be made to easily look very nice and centered on a 800x600 screen and also look nice on larger resolution screens, especially if you use the javascript that I mentioned to move the bottom menu up and down.
The last time I check browser statistic sites, about 1/2 of internet users used 800x600 and 1/2 higher resolution, with the trend growing away from 800x600 toward higher. Only 1% or so use 640x480, so I barely consider them when I design (sorry guys).
I think that I'd stick with the dark background on the site map page also. The thing to be careful of is that the letters show up nicely. It took me a bit to figure out why on one screen the text menu was purple and on the other it was blue. I finally figured out the purple was the 'visited' color.
The purple is a little hard to see on the dark background. If you keep the 'visited' color, you might make it a bit lighter/brighter. I personally don't use the 'visited' color on my sites. I use text menus like you have, but want them to look the same all the time, not some items blue and some purple. So I just don't define the 'visited' color. I don't think people care about that. Also, I like to have a rollover change on my menu items. In the case of text menus, I have my text color change when you move the mouse over it. You can see that on the HWB site. I don't like underlines my self, so I don't program in underlining on rollevers etc. If a person likes links underlined, they can set their browser to do that.
Hopefully this all makes some sense. I'm just kind of rambling. I'll give it a quick read thru before final posting. I'll also try to put together a quick demo page for moving the bottom menu.
Given that you have so many pages, are you using any special programming techniques to make things easier. For example, regarding your menu. You have it in two places on each page and eight different pages. The hard way would be to have 16 bits of menu HTML. Or you could find a way to code it once and somehow include it into the pages, so that if you change the menu, you have to change only one bit of code and it'll change in all 16 places. I've done that in the past with JSP and now I use PHP. If you don't want to both learning something like PHP right now, you might be able to do it with SSI (server side includes). I believe that you can put some type of include statement in your HTML and the webserver will insert the 'included' file before sending the page back to the browser. So, in theory, you could put the menu code in a separate file and include it twice on each page. I've never done this with SSI, but would think that it would work. First thing to check is that your webhosting provider supports it.
If I don't post back a link about the javascript code, if you are interested in it, feel free to email me.
