I am just wondering if using a picture as a hyperlink effects the se's ability to follow the link? I know this could be a dumb question. My home page just got indexed but I don't see any of my other pages listed... they are all connected together by hyperlinks... but I use a picture instead of just text... will that matter?
oh, and how long before its crawled again because they have the old page before I made all the changes to it... OMG I just realized why they don't have my other pages! My pages weren't connected together yet!!! Geeze... so how often does google crawl pages so I can get the correct page indexed?
SEs do use hyperlinked images to crawl pages, but I believe they prefer regular text links. It is common for Google to only index that home page, but no other pages. It takes time. How often Google re-crawls depends on a lot of factors. The more popular a page and the more often it is updated, the more often Google re-crawls.
How would they know it was updated until they crawl it? is there some way they find out when page content changes?
If the page has changed when they visit then they increase the crawl frequency. If the page is the same then they decrease it.
That depends on the quality and quantity of links pointing to your site as to when the bots will return, for some its a matter of days for others weeks. Having your site in your signature here may speed up the next crawl.