I can't tell you how much I value this site! As someone who frequently wades through "The Ballroom Technique" and Alex Moore's book, your site has a much better text description of Standard! Videos are, of course, great too. Keep up the good work!

Thanks, Steve! I'm glad you enjoy the material and find it helpful.

FYI, we're currently working on a revamp of the Learn the Dances section, to include greater technical detail in the man's and lady's charts, a slicker look and smoother navigation. The video is rendered with HTML5 instead of Flash, so people should have a much easier time with it, especially on iPhones and iPads.

If you want to take a sneak peek, here's a link:
http://new.ballroomdancers.com/Dances/syllabus.asp?dance=afx

A couple of caveats:

-- I've tested the video, but I've currently disabled the auto-play because it's a pain for me when I'm working on other parts of the page and constantly reloading it. If you want to see a video, you'll have to manually click one of the thumbnails on the video list (at least for now).

-- The link I gave you is to American Foxtrot. I know you're into the Int'l style, but I haven't done very much data entry for the Int'l dances yet. American smooth, especially bronze, will give you a much better showing of the filled-in charts with all the extra technical details.

-- Some links don't work yet, including the global drop-down menu. Feel free to click on anything, but don't be surprised if you hit a link that does nothing. The page is still a work in progress. Needless to say, I won't be making this page public until it's complete.

-- All of the tabs work (overview, man's part, lady's part, precedes & follows) except the discussion tab. I'm on that one now.

Take a look and let me know if you like where it's going. Once I'm done with this, I'll be doing a complete overhaul of the mobile web app, which will then also include the same level of detail.

Regards,
Jonathan Atkinson
www.ballroomdancers.com

Oh, also, I forgot to mention:

A big part of the reason we waited this long to do more detailed technical charts (aside from the daunting amount of data entry), was some of the technical hurdles involved in the database design and display of the information. One of those hurdles was figuring out how to squeeze a table with so many extra columns into a fixed-width web page of average size.

The solution we ended up with was one where each table, when it ends up being wider than the page, has a button in the upper right-hand corner. When you click on that button, the table slides over, revealing the remainder of the information. It's roughly the same as having a window with a horizontal scroll bar, but perhaps just a bit more elegant.

In addition to that, we also added resizable columns, so you can move things around if they don't look quite right to you, or if you want to squeeze more columns into a single view.

There's also a printer icon, which will allow you to view the entire table on a printed page. Just be sure to switch your print orientation to landscape, to ensure that it all fits.

Thanks again for the positive feedback!

Regards,
Jonathan Atkinson
www.ballroomdancers.com

yeah this is a good site. It's useful for me in several ways. Great work!

I just discovered this site and it is impressive. Just starting to dig thru the content. Hope it helps my dancing.

A job change cut in to the amount of time I can spend on this site, but as someone who has been on it and watching it develop for the past several years, I can tell you Jonathan's work to improve this and always make it relevant is really terrific. As for wether it will help your dancing, it's hard to imagine it wouldn't ... especially because you can interact so much in this format and get good ideas, advice, interpretations, pointers, etc., from excellent sources who love to help on this site. You'll see the occasional testy debate, but those are OK, too, and you always learn something from them. Some time in the future, I hope to be on the site as much as I used to be, which was pretty much every day for years!