Communication Site

Very nice, looks professional.
A couple of VERY minor things... I don't like the bg picture nor the white wavy lines running thru the picture on the home page... just MHO

Also, on your other pages... what are planning on putting in the RH column? You already have sub level navigation covered so I'm curious. You might think about dropping that down a bit to make it level with the LH text instead of the heading... again, just MHO and that may not be necessary depending on the content of the column.

I like the way you combined the sub level nav and the page title... might have to incorporate that myself

Overall... the judges say 9.5

Looks very nice to me

i like your design, even though a couple of tables jumped slightly on a mac with IE 5.1.
I do like the map-photo, but cut out the wavy lines, they're too distracting, and when the tables jump (like i have) the bottom wavy line doesn't completely connect to the little part of line on the map-photo.

apart from that it looks really nice. I like the nav, but i was wondering why when i'm on the homepage the button "champ reps" is highlighted.

good luck

Thank you for everyone's feedback.

Yes I hope that there is some content that will show up . Most likely it won't be copy but ads or something.

Champ reps is highlighted only to emphazie it to reps.
Should I downplay it more?

I like the overall design. Very good.

The main thing I don't like are the 3 boxes on the bottom right of the home page. When you hover they swop colours and I find the change too dazzling - it's like I blinked and have to refocus on the changed text to be able to read it again.

Also, not so sure about the colour of the top and bottom boxes, I think they don't quite fit the colour scheme and need a bit of tweaking.

Max

I like using the whole canvas, so I design sites to add graphic elements outside my content area, even if I don't have text there. To me, the page looks a bit like a table based design that has been duplicated in CSS. Consider using some more relevant graphic element for your background as a filler and make the page more seamless. One of the beauties of CSS is that you can layer graphics and tie them to top, bottom or either side allowing you to do things you can't do in HTML. With a little ingenuity, you can creat a page that will degrade gracefully, or, if you prefer the progressive enhancement method, will add various bits of eye candy for more modern browsers.

I'm not picking on you, blakems, - it always take a lot of courage to put a new site before a bunch of critics - but emulation of pixel-perfect table layouts just plain offends the CSS rebel in me since it represents the "safe road" in design. However, for corporate clients, sometimes that is what they want.

Problem is, the design isn't as safe as it looks, since you will experience uncontrolled wrapping of various elements at larger font sizes in Mozilla. (OK in IE because you are using fixed font sizes.) As a rule, never design for IE, design for the most compliant browser and THEN make the necessary accomodations with IE. You need to look at the wrapping problem and design for it. One of the first things you might consider is wrapping the problem areas in another div so that wrapping, if and when it occurs, causes controlled expansion of the container div it is in which buffers any effects on the divs below.

OK, enough carping. forget all the philosophical crap for now and concentrate on making the design "bombproof" by making it so you don't get a cascading failure through the design.

DE

I like using the whole canvas, so I design sites to add graphic elements outside my content area, even if I don't have text there. To me, the page looks a bit like a table based design that has been duplicated in CSS. Consider using some more relevant graphic element for your background as a filler and make the page more seamless. One of the beauties of CSS is that you can layer graphics and tie them to top, bottom or either side allowing you to do things you can't do in HTML. With a little ingenuity, you can create a page that will degrade gracefully, or, if you prefer the progressive enhancement method, will add various bits of eye candy for more modern browsers.

I'm not picking on you, blakems, - it always take a lot of courage to put a new site before a bunch of critics - but emulation of pixel-perfect table layouts just plain offends the CSS rebel in me since it represents the "safe road" in design. However, for corporate clients, sometimes that is what they want.

Problem is, the design isn't as safe as it looks, since you will experience uncontrolled wrapping of various elements at larger font sizes in Mozilla. (OK in IE because you are using fixed font sizes.) As a rule, never design for IE, design for the most compliant browser and THEN make the necessary accomodations with IE. You need to look at the wrapping problem and design for it. One of the first things you might consider is wrapping the problem areas in another div so that wrapping, if and when it occurs, causes controlled expansion of the container div it is in which buffers any effects on the divs below.

OK, enough carping. forget all the philosophical crap for now and concentrate on making the design "bombproof" by making it so you don't get a cascading failure through the design. In Firefox with modest increase in font size. ul#nl wraps, moving the image over which causes #sbar to wrap which moves div#col over which then dumps the float down. Your style cascades, but not in the usual sense.

DE

Thanks for the suggestion DCElliott on the scaling. Usually only design for 800x600 screen. I do agree that I need to make the site so it degrades nicely when a visitor reduces the screen size. I think the better option would be to force the horizontal scroll bar to appear for them to navigate.