I know what you mean, actually, I'm just launching into a philosophical point: I'm a minimalist when it comes to Web design, and I consider it a "sin" to clutter up a page with anything not directly relevant to the content. In other words, my design should never compete with the content, and I should never indulge myself by getting cute at the expense of the content.

BTW, I've noticed that badly cluttered pages are more often found at the Web sites of large corporations. Take Yahoo's front page, for example, which grew from a simple list of categories into something that looks like the Wednesday supermarket insert in a newspaper. It's due to the fact that every item on the front page has a constituency in the organization, people who are paid to fight tooth-and-nail for a piece of that real estate and whose careers rise and fall depending on how much space they get and how close to the top of the page it is. Clutter's inevitable in that environment, and it practically requires the use of tactical nukes to pry anything off a front page once it's there.

Luckily I don't face that particular problem here. In this case, my approach was to pour all the "cool" into showing off the photos to best advantage. Solid black background, a minimum of text (and too little by most accounts), gently fade the images in and out, that sort of thing. It's all about the photos and the complexity is all in the slideshow (and the shopping cart, a necessary evil). Within my aesthetic value system, it's OK to put everything I've got into the content.

You're right, Mark wanted "cool", but he wanted the cool applied to his photos. You notice he's too modest even to write his own bio, and I had to write it as an essay describing my experience hiking around the mountains with him while he worked. He wants to be in the background and let the photos represent him...he has the soul of an artist, that one. I'm still trying to convince him it's not too immodest to have a picture of himself on the bio page.

When I "sell" to a client, what I sell is minimalism. Everybody wants gratuitous Flash animations and a soundtrack and a string of blinkenlights, and most of the time my advice is to get rid of all that crap and focus on the content.

Basically I agree with you about "crap" on the page. I think in this case it's a matter of judging whether the complexity is necessary, and contributes to the content rather than detracts from it. If I get around the technical problems, I don't think it detracts. I hope.