Topic: Need Advice

I am not looking for a total review yet, still have quite a bit of coding left to do before that. What I am looking for is some advice on colors and design. Something just doesn't sit right with me, and I have been staring at it for so long I am having trouble giving myself an objective opinion.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.
http://dacc.ramasaxdesign.com

Ramasax

the ONLY things I'd change is the red colored link at the bottom caus of the heavy contrast to the background and maybe add a default y-overflow line for the vertical scrollbar, for the pages are 'jumping' quite a lot.

The title looks very good balanced but the sublinks shouldn't be white. If the main- and the sublinks have to be the same colour I'd use a darker gray or even blue. Maybe the same colour like the title has works, too.

when browsing through the links I found the 'research' button redirecting to another page kind of disturbing. you should leave it on the links page only or put it to the end of the line.

the rest seems to me ... perfect!

Oh ye great rivers of text are so mighty. God, how might we battle such beastly foes?

<GOD> Whitespace my designer, whitespace... </GOD>

Heh, just kidding. It's actually not too bad, but a little more white space (left/right margins) would go a long way. A tad more line spacing might help as well (but what you currently have it probably enough). Some more whitespace in the header and menus couldn't hurt either.

The link text colour is a sticlker too. White works fine for the first level, perhaps an underline would help to push their "link" significance, but most users should be able to figure it out. The lower menu levels on the other hand start to fade away into the background. Not cool. A darker colour for the lower menu levels it about all that'll save you on such a light background color. Perhaps using a smaller font size here to signify the lower status of the links might help as well.

The black outlines aren't going down too well. Perhaps a dark blue, but the black is just too heavy.

Appart from that, I think it's really good. Nice job man.

I agree with everything Cameron said. particularly the second level menu link color, and the black borders.

In addition, that tannish/orange color simply isn't working. It doesn't work in the graphic at the top, and it is much to faint for your header color in the pages.

Something with a bit more bite for the headers, and something perhaps a little more saturated but lighter for the graphic.

The page headers are pretty washed out and visually insignificant at the moment.

All in all I think it is a great design.

Thanks for the replies guys, they helped a lot.

Kaz, as far as I know the dis- and re-appearance of the vertical scroll in mozilla is something listed in their bug list. It was getting on my nerves too, so I just added a height:100% to the body selector, seems to work... Definately better than having the site bounce around.

As far as the research link goes, I had already suggested to the client that if they must have it we should add a page describing their relationship with the linked organization, and link from there. Waiting for a response, but since they have been pretty agreeable thus far I added a blank page for now, as it was an annoyance to me too.

Cameron: Whitespace? What's that? heh. You are right of course, increased the padding and some margins a bit, think it looks a little better. I changed the color of the submenu text to a dark blue and decreased the size a notch as well.

I lightened the borders up a bit.

Still working on the orangish color. I took DL's suggestion about the header, looks good to me. Darkened up the h1-6 a bit, still not enough "bite" I don't think. Not sure where to go with this, need to play I guess. Sometimes when I get stuck I take a screenshot and paste it into PS, then play with the image correction.

My next task is figuring out the code to make the actively chosen menu links distinguishable from the rest. Since I am using includes for just about everything here, I can't just add a style to the specific page's menu. Never done this before, anyone have any links to the php code for something like this? I can probably work out the asp equivalent from there.

Thanks again guys,

Ramasax