Finally got the site improved a little tonight.  I’ve spent a lot of time tryong to figure out how to widen the standard WordPress pages so that my images are not squashed.  Too much time, in fact.  So, I bagged the whole idea of modifying the pages and just created some of my own with KompoZer.  I think that if I know CSS  and PHP a little more I could get something going, but I have too little time now.