Hello archondigital,
I just came across your post, and I must say a really like what you did to your site, specially because it is full with very cool features and functions. I do have a couple of suggestions for you:
1. From a technical point of view, I noticed you run a lot of scripts in your page. Most of them are embedded externally, like the Javascripts, which is goodl, but there are some that are actually embedded internally.
In the first W3C release recommendations of XHTML 1.0 (which is the language your page is using) that were released in 2000, the W3C seemed to be ok with embedding scripts as long as you used the CDATA tag. Indeed, in paragraph 4.8 they say the following:
In XHTML, the script and style elements are declared as having CDATA content. As a result, < and & will be treated as the start of markup, and entities such as < and & will be recognized as entity references by the XML processor to < and & respectively. Wrapping the content of the script or style element within a CDATA marked section avoids the expansion of these entities.
However, in a W3C WG Note released a little over a year ago, they recommend not to embed scripts internally and to do so externally:
DO use external scripts if your script uses < or & or ]]> or –. DO NOT embed a script in a document if it contains any of these characters.
Rationale: While XML provides the CDATA structure to embed data such as this, that method will not work correctly should the document be delivered as media type text/html. The best way to insulate your scripts and stylesheets is to make them external.
According to these notes, it seems like doing so ensures a greater compatibility and portability from agent (browser or platform) to agent. Since I’m no expert in the matter, I would like to hear what others have to say about this, but I would consider creating those scripts as stand-alones and embed them externally just to be on the safe side.
2. From a design point of view, I agree with mercime and you should really consider adding more martial arts related media. Another thing that I noticed (but this is very personal) is that your top menu does not fit in one line and the ContactUs tab falls into the next one. If you’re not planning to expand your topmenu any further with other tabs (that would fill in the blank next to the ContactUs tab), then I recommend one of two things to make everything fit in one line (if this is smth you would like to do):
a. Regroup two or more tabs together under a broader category, for instance, “Groups” and “Members” under “Community”, or “Links” and “Videos” under “Resources.” That way you would be able to free up some space in the top line to make the ContactUs tab fit; OR
b. Place your topmenu under your logo instead of to its right. This would give you more ‘breating space’ in the heading and also allow for future addition of tabs (since the topmenu would spread accross the entire containing frame). If you go with this option, you might want to increase your logo size so as not to leave a very big empty space in the middle (between the logo and the Search bar.
This is all I have for now, but I see other stuff I’ll let you know. Hope you find this useful!
