Site redesign suggestions sought

http://www.ericlindsay.com/epoc/brec5.htm is a typical (but short) page
from one topic on my site. It is one of the sections most recently
worked on, so the structure is cleaner than most of my older pages. The
pages are mostly very similar to each other. All pages should be valid
HTML 4.01 Strict (the sample one is). Styling is via CSS (thanks to
help from people in these groups four or five years ago).

I plan to use this section of the site as a testbed for techniques for
the rest of the site. It is reasonably large (87 pages) but the content
is fairly stable (mostly obsolete PDA with only a few new programs
appearing), however I have minor corrections to apply to many pages
(link rot). I probably don't need any database techniques for it
(unlike some other topics)

Things I like:
The h1 and main content are straight after the body tag, ready for
search engines. It works well on PDA browsers that don't have CSS.
Navigation doesn't appear until after the content. However at the time
I wrote the pages, I couldn't figure how to put the navigation on the
left instead of the right, which is why the local navigation is on the
right. I don't mind that.

Things to change:

Local navigation is way too long, and is a few styled paragraphs in a
div, with each link followed by a <br>. These days I would imagine that
would be done with a list? I have about 75 links, but about 87 files.
No idea which files went missing. Plus each page may have different
errors in the list of files (one reason I need to use a CMS or something
there). Showing initially just the local subset of the full list of
files might be sensible.

The bread crumb navigation trail seems clear enough but very plain.
Perhaps it should go in a box right at the base of the screen. The
Contact link and/or a Search link could probably go there also. If I
can get away with it, having that fixed at the base of the display might
be nice (the same way the sideways graphic of the URL and topic is fixed
on the left hand side of the display.

The borders were intended to appear something like the borders used in
Psion Epoc applications. They are not a very good imitation so far.
Plus Psion applications all use drop down menus, so maybe I should look
at totally imitating how they appear?

Things I thought I would get rid of:

The mailto: link is obscured, but spammers can read that anyway, so I
think removing the mailto from every page. Point to a single Contact
page on the site so I only have one place for spammers to grab my
address. Objection, less convenient for readers wanting to send email.

The nocss text about using a web standard browser was probably a total
mistake. I suspect it merely annoys anyone who actually sees it, and
probably doesn't work well as propaganda.

The valid HTML icon was probably a mistake. If you are going to have
similar tags, then it seems to me you should have icons for all the
things that are valid. If the site was already graphically rich, these
icons would either fade into the noise, or look totally out of place.
In a sparse image site, it looks even sillier.

Suggestions regarding design experiments would be most welcome.

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http://www.ericlindsay.com