Faceless Guy

What exactly are you trying to say with that smiley?

That's a hell of an ugly site sure, but what bothers me most is the fully animated background on each page. It really distracts from reading the text (which isn't really worth being read).

When selecting "Forum Home" in the list at the bottom of the page (quick jump) you're brought to "http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/;, which returns a 404 error. Just wanted to point that out.

I once saw a road sign: "do not jump here, you may fall". I had something like "well d'uh, but what's gonna make me wanna jump here?"

Without criticising your contents, your site looks (I'm sorry to say) too boring. I stand by the saying "design the contents, not the page", but you need to "sell" yourself. Try adding some color or something (but stay away from animated gifs, they only distract your readers from reading what is important). On the bright side: your site is well structured, has enough white space between page elements and is easily readable.

I often come across websites where it is told that keywords have a high search engine value when they're on top of the page. Can somebody confirm this? I'm just asking, because I think it's strange that a search engine can understand the structure of a webpage (in terms of layout of page elements) enough to know what parts are important.

Because domain names are being registered by the millions each year, finding a good and available domain name is very hard (I know). But your domain name should also reflect your marketing strategy, for example "priceworthywebdesigns.com" vs. "excellingdesigns.com". See my point?

IMHO there's more to checking compatibility than only the visual representation in the browser. I'm talking about javascript, tabbing in forms, file uploads, and many more things I come across when buildin websites. I can't think of any specific problem right now though.Furthermore you can not check accessibility in for instance speech browsers. I usually test only in IE, FF and Chrome and keep in mind which CSS-rules older IE versions cannot handle correctly.