I like the second one better, but I can see how most people would like the first one. I am overly analytical from the start, so I am kind of a freak in that aspect.

To be safe, I would go with the first one.

Never place form over function. Function is always first, form follows function.

I'd rather take plain old tables and blocks on a site THAT WORKS CORRECTLY than a site that is dynamic but broken.

When I open a details page all the images scale to the size of my screen. I made it full screen on a 32" monitor, and instead of more to a page I get four large-scale images. I opened on my tablet and instead of a good looking page I get for micro-icons. Fix that.

No search, no filter, no automatic watermark. Fix that.

Lots of scrolling, especially when I make it full screen on my big wide screen monitor. Fix that.

Don't worry about fancy at this point.

First version + maybe mouse hover over an thumbnail shows the detailed version?

Are you the only one working on this site? Where do the assets come from?

edit:

I was trying to figure out why people liked the first version better. On screens with landscape orientation, the first one is indeed better. The second one looks very disorganized. But on portrait orientation, which is the way I have my monitor set up, the second one does not look as offensive, and can actually look better because you have presented the assets in also-tall forms. I can see a lot of them all at once.

So yeah, stay with number 1 because 99% people have their monitors on landscape.

First one, easier to glance at several parts.

But please do something about that dynamic resizing. When all blocks have the same size why do things jump about while loading? That's annoying.

My 2c:

1) Your header has a lot of wasted space - get your most important content above the fold. Make the stuff your selling the first thing people see.

2) That sidebar is gigantic and is fighting for attention - are you drawing attention to the content your selling or your sidebar? Shrink it down or move it elsewhere.

Hi, sorry for the late response, First of all thank you to everyone for such valuable feedback.

I generally agree with everyone and see the pros and cons of each screen. In the end I am going to stay with screen one or possibly the third option suggested by Mussi which is a kind of mix between the two. In fact due to the feedback from this forum I shall be concentrating on other aspects of the site, the display of the index page shall remain as page one until other priorities have been taken into account and fixed, owing to the general consensus among the comments in this topic, it seems that page one was the most liked anyway.

@Frob , this advice is invaluable, and I am currently working on bettering the aspects you mentioned, I have already implemented a filter system, which shall later be upgraded to a tagging as suggested by @servant of the lord, Although the water mark system is not much of a priority at the moment I can add that when I create the preview images, As they are manually created anyway. details page shall soon be under review too! I will fix thesuggested icon size too.

@Mussi, Thanks for the link about prices and marketing,I read it thouroughly and saw the point about the power of nine which I suppose is the one you were trying to make. Yeah I always thought it made prices more appealing. But I think I will still round prices off, just for the fact that I don't want people to end up with loose change in their credit for the site, This would be unfair to people.

@alnite. Yeah It's only me working on the site, I produce the assets too and try to handle all the promotion and administration, It's a real slog and a time suck although I kind of enjoy seeing people sign up and use assets, and receiving messages from people too, all that stuff kinda makes it worth it. Just the development of the site alone is massive and I'm currently getting a bit tired of web development, It's gets repetitive quite fast! ! but bit by bit something appears to be taking form, although a lot needs to be polished.

@boolean, Yeah I'm glad you mentioned the size of that side bar, at the moment I'm developing a site feed and blog system for the site so the side bar is going to be up for the chop when that's ready. Yeah I see the wasted space issue with the header too, before there was more text in there, now it looks bare, I think it's time for a move around.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to actually visit my site make a comparison then come here and write about it. Every comment has been a great help! I will post again when I finish the next round of site updates!

My 2c:

1) Your header has a lot of wasted space - get your most important content above the fold. Make the stuff your selling the first thing people see.

2) That sidebar is gigantic and is fighting for attention - are you drawing attention to the content your selling or your sidebar? Shrink it down or move it elsewhere.

I'll second your #1. In particular on a lower-resolution display (or if running the browser in a non-maximized window) you don't even see the assets at all on the first page, whereas on the second you only see the top parts of the first row.