Agree that navigation difficult to see, and that intro text needed. I would also add that underlining makes it seem like your date and news item heading are links. It's not a hard-and-fast rule, but generally underlining is avoided for anything other than linking.

Focusing on positives: I like the scrolling links for your affiliates (and I'm normally against scrolling text and images), as it adds a dynamic element that your site needed without being distracting. Logo and logo text are funky too.

While frames are generally to be avoided, and if you're looking at web design in any kind of longer term view, it's something to start avoiding now, there's no real pressing need for you to change if (1) it doesn't cause any of the people in your group accessibility issues (like if they're using a text reader) and (2) you're not looking for people to find your site. Seems to me that there are some elements of general good web design practice that aren't absolutely necessary for personal and small audience websites - especially if this site isn't intended on staying around for 2 or more years. After all, they did include a frameset doctype flavour for XHTML 1.0 (not 1.1 tho, which is why I say if it looks like this is going to stay up long term, frames aren't such a good idea).

Also, this may seem like a bit of a cheat, but I would recommend adding some news a couple of times a week over the next few weeks. When I see sites with news with 1-3 articles, I think that it's a dead site (when if I look at your forums, you have people posting and viewing there), and I think that many users make this assumption too - it doesn't matter whether your site is new or not, as the users aren't going to look at the last modified info (because we are lazy ).

Perhaps add a news item about the fact that you've had some feedback here, and that people can expect to see changes soon?

Mm'possibly. At the moment though, everyone in our site just skips through the front page anyway and they just go directly to the forum. I'm going to work on coding in PHP, Javascript, and SQL a set of intergrated scripts for chat, news and things like that. I'd do the forums too, but no one wants to lose our posts

We recently had a big problem (I'm a member of the community) And we are redoing alot of stuff. Stay posted *wink*

-reply by MasterBlue