Community @ The Turning Gate

Hi All

I am a new user hoping The Turning Gate will work for me.  I can code html and have several functioning sites, including two photographic:  fwspics.com and frederickstephenson.com.  Both use Lightroom templates.  I am interested in The Turning Gate because of its shopping cart, client response gallery, and other features I would not want to code.  I am also hoping the gallery images will load faster than the Lightroom galleries.

Two immediate questions:

I prefer the home page to have links to various galleries and not have a gallery index page.  It looks like this is doable, but then I see this sentence in the documentation:  "The way that TTG sites are designed and organized, your site should always be fully navigable from a single-level navigation system, using the Galleries page to access all of your image galleries."  Is that really true.  It would seem that if you link to the index page for a gallery that should work.  (I assume the site navigation will be on each gallery page?)

My site fwspics is using the Lightroom track gallery where the thumbnail images load for a gallery in a horizontal line (the software is making the height of each image the same, I assume).  I like the effect; is that manner of loading the thumbnails possible here.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Fred