TFArchive

The Transformers Archive

Long-established international fan site covering twenty+ years of giant robots.

With a few people working on the site and a lot of legacy content, HTML validation is secondary to ensuring pages are accessible and functional for as many users as possible. The focus is on testing with common browsers and resolving any incompatibilities.

Text-only browsers are particularly considered when adding non-image content, to facilitate accurate and useful search engine results, and navigation and layout adhere where possible to the KISS principle.

Some sections of the site (toy reviews, creative work) use database backends to facilitate ease of adding content, and we've recently started using a wiki as a CMS for less technically-inclined members to add content. On the whole, though, we prefer to build our own code — it's easier to keep track of things from a security perspective.

By now blame for most of the design decisions and erratic update schedules can be laid at my feet.