would we assume you're optimising The Company Pictures site mainly for the macintosh (safari) brigade?
the photography site didn't clearly show the menu bars at the bottom of my firefox browser leaving me irritated that i'd waited for the thing to load and appeared to have nowhere to go.
it wasnt until i tried it in IE7 at slightly different browser dimensions that i saw the way in, and i'm a relatively savvy web user in comparison to the general public. if this site has a high bounce rate this could be a reason why?
otherwise I like the look and feel both of them -apart from also personally disliking the over-large popups but that's probably more us control freaks than jo bloggs & wife who dont even know what a pop up is.
do you know how the photography one ranks in the engines and what kind of conversion rates they get?