Intranet site - corporate template

[bcarl314]

Working on a corportate intranet site trying to be as symantec as possible with 508 and XHTML compliance.

However, my strong suit has never been design. Let me know what you think of this...

http://www.aphion.com/usps/etravel/index.html

Personally, I think the top nav and the rest of the site clash, but people here seem to like it.

Any suggestions for improvement?


Oh and one other thing, how can I get bookmarks to validate?

<a name="top"></a>

Thanks

[gsnedders]

Problems

• Use

  <a id="top"></a>

  instead of

  <a name="top"></a>

• The navigation is in the middle and hidden behind the table
• Only by looking at the code did I know there was a top navigation bar, hidden my the Welcome bar
• The first few paragraphs of the Welcome Message are all on the right, on the left there is a massive white section.
• Text in the logo isn't clear
  

Nice Bits

• Colours

Results from Apple Safari

[bcarl314]

Thanks, I noticed the same overlapping problem in Mozilla. I couldn't figure out how to fix it.

Any ideas? I've tried the z-index property, but that only works on positioned elements (according to w3schools.com).

Also, can you post a screen shot of the "on the left there is a massive white section." I haven't seen this in testing. Actually, just a screen shot in general could be very helpful from Safari.

Thanks

[gsnedders]

Isn't there some CSS value which will lock an element against a side, as for the screenshot, see the attachment (sorry about the size, had to get within the 50KB file size limit).

[bcarl314]

Wow.

That is significantly different than what I see in IE6, and Moz 1.6.

Guess it's back to the ol drawing board.

[gsnedders]

I could help you make it compatible for free, but I could only start doing anything next week...

[oracleguy]

The yellow color of the bar below the title seems to bother me a bit; yellow adjacent to blue seems a little off.. I'm not much of a designer but I'd consider using a different color.

[shlagish]

The yellow bar at the top left is not nice. The menu at the left has a background that I think doesn't fit with the rest.
Maybe having a chrome look to it would be nice?

[bcarl314]

Ok, Here's take 2. I radically changed the color scheme and layout. Is this any better? Any thoughts?

Thanks again for all your help.

Link:
http://aphion.com/usps/etravel/indexAlt.html

[Vladdy]

MUCH better.
Few things I would change:
- use sans-serif font
- add more padding to navigation items
- increase line spacing for content.

[gsnedders]

Just the things Vladdy said, and it looks as if it was meant to look how it does.

[mindlessLemming]

OMG what an improvement!

[shlagish]

I can't beleive how well you're handling brown
lol
looking very nice.
When I see it, I feel like flying to a desert and going on camel rides..
but that's just me

[Vladdy]

Few more thing:

Do not jump the navigation text on hover (there was time when I thought it was cool myself) - it is rather distracting. Change text color, background, add border, anything but jumping text...

Remove the navigation underline - it makes it too crowded (it is pretty obvious in this day and age that those are links)

I would find another place for breadcrumbs (Current Location). Where it is now, it simply repeats the header above it....

Use font units for nav blocks width and height so that text does not spill over when font size increases....

[shlagish]

For the breadcrumbs, maybe just after the header above it..
So you have the current location, and it's path (according to the site, not the url)..
get it?