Critique of polarbearandpenguin.co.uk

[AnotherDesigner]

Hi

After reviewing some websites on here, I thought I'd put mine up for review...

The URL is http://www.polarbearandpenguin.co.uk and I'd greatly appreciate any feedback on the site.

Points of note:
1) I'm aware the site doesn't validate as Transitional XHTML...
2) I'm also aware that a large number of warnings are thrown up when testing the CSS
3) I'm aware that I put on the site it was valid XHTML and CSS!

Basically - I put valid XHTML and CSS on the pages, and then attached a counter to each page... Although the counter is 'supposed' to be valid XHTML, it throws errors up when validating it.
So if anyone has any suggestions for making the site XHTML and CSS valid based on the error messages, I'd greatly appreciate it!

Many thanks in advance for those who review and post on the site... It's greatly appreciated.

PS This is the first site I've actually designed fully, and as you can see I've been trying to stick to the W3C guidelines!

[NogDog]

Nice clean design that encourages me to want to take a look. The basic text size is a bit small for my taste, but not horribly so. Viewing with Firefox, when I increased the text size one or two increments things were fine, but the third increment started some overlapping problems at the bottom of the page. Could be a problem for people with worse vision than my not-so-great eyes.

On the home page, the main text block is indented quite a bit on the left side, unlike the other pages. This leaves a sort of empty feeling there, don't you think?

Other than that, I think it's quite effective.

[Charles]

[[i]f anyone has any suggestions for making the site XHTML and CSS valid based on the error messages, I'd greatly appreciate it!You've one syntax error there that isn't caught by the validator because it isn't a validity issue - "validity" is just one of several measures of rightness or wrongness in XHTML. You've moved the xml declaration to after the DOCTYPE. Put there it's is completely meaningless. User agents and parsers that don't find it at the very top of the page will stop looking. Put that thing at the top where it belongs or do away with it. Or better yet switch to HTML!

The validity errors that you are all getting are all have to do with the incorrect use of "&" in URLs. They each need to be "&".

And HTML or XHTML, do consider using a strict DOCTYPE. We were supposed to stop using transitional years ago and your page is almost strict. Just one little change and you're there.

[AnotherDesigner]

Charles, thanks for looking at the site... With regards the javascript, the only time "&" is used in there is, I believe, a result of a stat counter I've installed which uses javascript... I don't understand (I've no idea about Javascript I admit it!) how I can correct this javascript to make it 'valid' - the code for the stat counter was a simple cut + paste job from the stat counter provider....

NogDog thanks for the feedback... the home page is a 3 column design, whereas the other pages are 2 column. I know it looks odd at the moment as it's blank, but the left-most column on the homepage will have a couple of banner links/affiliate links to my other websites once they're online. I'm also going to supply an alternative stylesheet to combat the overlapping problems... hopefully that will combat the issue.

[Charles]

As I wrote above, every "&" needs to be a "&".