With all that Cascading Style Sheets have to offer, it would be silly not to take advantage of them, given my browser requirements. Unfortunately, when developers complain about how buggy CSS implementations are, I think they're usually being polite and understating the severity of the problem.
Font handling was by far the worst difference. What looked good in one browser was invariably either too big or too small for the other. Both Netscape also had countless bugs in the cascading/inheritance rules, and I'm still not even sure if IE was implementing it all properly, either. I even uncovered some new bugs in Netscape - at least, I'd never read about them anywhere else. My favorite is when applying a style to a table cell, it works properly only as long as the text of the cell doesn't wrap around to two or more lines. That took me weeks to debug! I found even more CSS2-related bugs, which I'll talk about later.
In the end, although I tried my best to avoid it, the only way I could make the CSS features work seamlessly across all browsers was to use different style sheets for each one. This meant I had to do browser detection on every page. (Actually, I could have used a few interesting hacks to do this with just HTML, but I felt it was cleaner to do it right, especially since the less-than-one-KB sniffer script would have already been cached after visiting the introduction page.)
I still think there's a big advantage to using CSS...once it's actually working. It's that big effort it takes to get it working that really stinks.
I won't even go into all the grief I had in scanning all the photographs in. Suffice to say, my color adjusting skills are very much in need of improvement. I will, however, give myself points for the effort that went into the thumbnails. Although one's instincts might be to write a perl script or use any of the various shareware programs for generating thumbnails from a directory of images, I knew from the beginning that an 80-by-80 picture of one countryside photo is going to look very much the same as the next at that reduced size. So obeying one of the "good deeds" of graphic design, I cropped and reduced only relevant portions of the photos, rather than the whole thing. I think this made them much more distinct and identifiable, preventing viewers from having to squint through a magnifying glass just to determine if they even want to see the enlarged versions.
Next time, however, as I'd mentioned elsewhere, I'm definitely paying the extra few bucks to have my film put onto photo CDs. And hopefully, I'll have better luck at convincing Erin to do all the color adjustments. :-)