We are a tile and paint contractor

our website portfolio has a CSS image gallery
http://www.cupantileandpaint.com/gallery.html

it looks cool in my eyes

but would homeowners that are potential customers
have a hard time figuring out you need to hover over images
even though it says it in three places on page?

should we adopt another form of gallery?

It will probably depend on the user so it's hard to say. I thought it was pretty cool. Definitely different. A lot of people don't read much on a page so they may miss the message no matter how many times you say it.

I think the best way to find out is to see if you can watch a couple of typical customers on the page. Don't tell them what's there, but just watch and see what they do. That will really give you a better answer than anything anyone here will say.

Its a cool effect, but it looks weird in its initial stacked state. Its cool for tech savy people who can appreciate its uniqness, but I don't think its visually troubling for the average customer.

some other contractor told me that my design was something from the 90s
and said something about flash and animated gifs

I have niether of that on my CSS site

is he just jealous?

here's the post from another site blog: http://www.contractortalk.com/showth...467#post178467

I think I may want to adopt a hover image gallery whereas the hover displays larger image

just want to make a series of images fit all on one page, not too long of scrolling, and ability to see full image without clicking to another page or bringing a pop up

I like the js lightbox that's becoming so popular, but will the js make worrisome the systems with high security browsers?

Matt I read that forum post and I do understand what that person was saying. I also agree with him in general.

Many people think that design is all about impressing visitors to the site with some cool animation or technology, when in truth all it does is distract people from accomplishing their goals on the site.

True your site isn't using any kind of animation, but the gallery will likely make it difficult for some to see the images. Thus it's choosing a certain 'wow' factor over making the site more usable to your average visitor.

People here are going to be tech savvy. Most of us will explore a site and mouse over things just to see if something happens. So from our perspective the gallery works fine. We're probably not your typical visitor though.

I would expect visitors to your site will on average be less tech savvy than the average person on a webmaster forum. Your visitors may never realize to mouse over the images even if you tell them too. Many of them may even think something is wrong with the way the site is displaying.

It's why I suggested watching how real visitors will interact with your site.

I don't think you have to worry too much about using JS. Yes there are some people who will have it turned off, but most of your visitors will likely have it on.

The idea situation would be to have a fallback for those that don't use JS.

Keep the advice in that other forum in mind though. What are your goals for having the gallery? I would guess to show potential customers examples of your work. You don't need JS or Flash or any kind of fancy gallery to do that. You just need the images.

The fancy galleries can be nice, but a few thumbnails that open into a larger image will do the trick and often much easier than the impressive gallery.

For the thumbnails to larger gallery, you might want to check out Lightbox - very cool, easy to implement: http://ahavriluk.home.comcast.net/lightboxEx/doc/

In Firefox, the box that I'm assuming you want to be on the right side.. with the logo, is overlapping your header, doesn't look good.

no, I wanted that affect of box over bg image
gives them more incentive to click around and see what's behind the door

leaves something to imagination
to check out portfolio pics by navigating there

we will use the lightbox effect

but,

we have bugs on page to fix

http://www.cupantileandpaint.com/gallery.html

how do we get black back overlay to be in window when scrolled down

the description box is spaced a gap below
and the play/pause slideshow button and close button aren't there

and we have like 60 errors on page, in part to the js
will these errors effect search engine crawls / rankings?

a little help