Sorry, but entrance pages our my biggest websurfing pet peeve. I, like many other people I know(especially the more technologically savvy...not neccessarily correlated) like to open as many windows as you need, and wait for them to load. This doesn't work terribly well when you have to wait for the entrance page to load, then you have to click it, and then wait for further loading. Throws off your timing and websurfing groove. And its unnecessary, unless it has some sort of information on it that is vital to viewing the rest of the page.
Next, picture galleries #1 and #2, as linked to from the navbar, seem a bit odd, personally. Each one of those galleries being divided into several other galleries makes the purpose seem kind of moot. Is there perhaps a more technical reason behind this? I'm not very into webdesign(if only you could do it entirely in asm or C++!<G>...sort of sad when you're better at those than at HTML...), so I wouldn't know.
One other suggestion, mostly echoing an earlier posting- get rid of the amazon banner. Its rather incongruous, and there are much better places to search for bargains on books, such as
http://www.asces.com
, that aren't quite so ubiquitous. And it'd be nice if you could get some of those banners side by side, instead of vertical.
Otherwise, it seems nice. I'd provide more competent feedback in netscape was a bit more stable, but its having a bit of trouble with this 'working correctly" thing. I would get rid of the flaming letters, too, and instead use that nifty animated Gif you have as a link to your site(though perhaps, instead of doing it letter by letter, do the two letter transliterations at a time "Ai" then "Ki" then "Do")
Also, yet another suggestion- perhaps aikido universe is a rather generic name for a rather specific site. Your site seems to be for a particular dojo, but the name sounds like it'd be a site somewhat similar to aikiweb- ie, not affiliated with anything specific(other than, of course aikido), but rather a general look at the whole subject. You might want to change your name tho something else. Though having grabbed that domain name might be a good idea, whether you want to squat on it, or prevent others from doing so.
Anyway, I suppose I'm not that good a judge of websites, not making them myself(if you want a good laugh, you can visit mine(though it has nothing on aikido yet) at
http://www.geocities.com/pjpii_2000/ )
Have a nice day, and sorry if this seems to critical
Alex Magidow