Dave,
I'd say you're doing great for coding it by hand. Coding by hand really is an art that is difficult to get good at. I wish I could help you out with it more, but unfortunately I really have forgetten most of what little html coding I used to know.

As far as the thumbnail thing, I think that Macromedia Fireworks 4 has a feature that allows batch processing to create thumbnails, but I didn't install it on my new computer so I don't know for sure. I still do it the manual way using paint shop pro 6.02. I have a hard time with the vector based image editing programs. It has taken me a lot of years to get decent at making sites and like you, I'm entirely self taught. The best thing I ever did was givinig up on Netscape Composer and taking the time to learn Dreamweaver 2. The Template and Library Item capabilities in Dreamweaver allow you to build large sites without using frames and easily update them later. When I do the annual update on wonbass.com, these features save me literally hundreds of hours. Front Page has similar features but all of the Microsoft html generating programs are total garbage in my opinion. They design the pages only for the IE browser and they add so much additional html that you don't need, it makes the pages slow to load.

So I mentioned my new computer and I think I need to brag }> I built myself an AMD Athalon 1600+ XP box with 512 megs of PC2100 ram and a 32meg Radeon VE video card. I'm running Windows XP with Office XP and this thing smokes! Just had to share ... sorry !