Website technical improvements (Website Guru stuff)

Projects to tackle:

1) Setup the nav bar to emulate starwars.com
- smaller text
- centered and spaced
- highlights on mouse rollover
- top menu sticks to nav bar when you scroll down far enough

2) Forums upgrade / switch
- Evaluate myBB as a possible replacement to vBulletin (Mark to do this part)
- Add facebook / twitter quick registration and authentication (make sure we still get an e-mail address during registration)
- Can we do a single sign on or share the membership database so that visitors to either thundercats.org or guardiansfan.com can visit the forums of both sites without having to login twice?
- Can we embed threads in static website pages, and enable forums shared comments on posts? Basically, I want relevant threads or comments to be built more into the site... I want to get rid of intensedebate and tie the forums into the site in its place [looking at XenWord to implement this kind of integration, requires a license purchase]

3) Flashgames from WB site to be hosted at thundercats.org
http://www.kidswb.com/event/thundercats/game/thundercats-the-rescue
http://www.kidswb.com/event/thundercats/game/thundercats-the-orb-of-madness

- We don't necessarily have to host the games on the site, we could embed the games on our site, so long as they can play from within our site nav bar without being sent to wb's page
- I do want to make sure we have saved copies of these games... I fear that WB will remove this section soon and we'll lose the games forever, I want to preserve them


4) Google Analytics

I want to start tracking the traffic to all pages on the site including forums. Done in Xenforo admin panel but need to test it in a few days time

New Project List

1) Header and Nav Bar
- Logo to the left
- Sticky menu bar to have a smaller version of the logo snap into place when user scrolls down past header (logo to act as the home button)
- Nav bar to have bigger Social Media icons
- Add a search icon far right of menu bar
- Place a horizontal responsive ad in the header space or directly below header and body
- Add icons for menu bar items

2) Avada cleanup & improvements
- Front page still loading way too slowly (compress images and scripts)
- Auto way to remove titles in bulk where we have button?
- Need to decide whether to replicate page title image buttons or work with some sort of new element
- Clean up tables and formatting
- Proper font across all pages
- Logo not showing up for some users? [Resolved by compressing logo image size]
- Add newsletter sign up / e-mail capture will need to export the e-mails to the Xenforo member database, or setup signups as new forums members in order to e-mail all
- Provide navigation between episode reviews

3) Forums improvements
- Implement the same header and nav bar from the main site
- Can we do a single sign on or share the membership database so that visitors to either thundercats.org or guardiansfan.com can visit the forums of both sites without having to login twice?
- Look at Xenword or another bridge plugin to integrate the forums and the site. I want relevant forums threads or comments to be built more into the site... I want to get rid of intensedebate and tie the forums into the site in its place
- Should we allow forums users to upload images?
- Instant Messaging between members?
- Add newsletter sign up / e-mail capture (want this in the Xenforo members database)

Future improvements in general
- Add social media feeds to the site or forums somewhere?
- Improve the shop area
- Link to ebay auctions for toy / statue / merch items on the content page themselves
- Add apple itunes or amazon video streaming links to episodes on the review pages
- Put a reduced footprint newsletter signup in the header area
- Enable user reviews of toys / merch / episodes

Site speed has improved greatly after the change of theme and forums upgrade. Also installed a wordpress plugin that sped up the site and that compresses images losslessly when loaded through the media tool. We used to have a page speed around 69%-71% and we're now over 90%

Here's how we rank speed wise against he-man.org and thundercatsnow.com