That's a very noble idea for a website! You can't go wrong with supporting the troops
I see what you mean about the notice, it's definitely the kind of thing which should go only on the homepage. But I can see you're already speaking to someone about modifying your navbar template, which is a good idea.
This is nothing major, but if you're browsing the site in a lower resolution, parts of the site are fixed width and some are fluid. I was browsing using Chrome, but my window didn't fill my screen so the header looked a bit messed up. It's not a huge deal though.
You've actually got 2 welcome messages. One is your big Notice, the other one is your "Welcome to the Forums" message. I'd look at getting rid of that, it's wasting space.
Check out this post:
http://www.vbseo.com/f28/how-make-yo...tml#post174348
In fact this might solve both problems. You can either modify navbar to only show your welcome notice on the homepage, or you can just disable the notice and edit your FORUMHOME template (what's in between the 'Guest Welcome Message' comments). You'd also need to shuffle it around a little bit to move it up. And obviously the big downside is that you'd have to edit your template every time you want to change your message.
This post has a ton of information which helped me:
http://www.vbseo.com/f45/your-site-r...o-first-23762/
Ignore the first 2 sections, but most of the rest is relevant.
Definitely look at setting up vBSEO Sitemap, Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics, it will help you a lot. My traffic has gone from 600 to over 1000 visitors a day, and my registration rate has improved dramatically