Forums | MacLife

you asked for it   

i'll be nice.

okay, you're using images as text, but it's rollovers.  You can be forgiven.

it's not too bad.

I think I'd shrink the images on the top (just the images) by about a third. see what that looks like.  They tend to dominate the site, drawing focus away from content.

One definite thing to change is that the rollovers also show descriptive information about the link.  This is duplicative. the links seem pretty clear as to their meaning, so what happens is 2 things: 1) extra info that's not really needed and b) when someone rolls over the link, their focus is on the link itself, but then they have to change focus to read the descriptive text. Might want to re-think that one.

the blue dividers on the sub-level pages are overpowering, too intense. tone them down, make them leaner.

The top navigation on those pages is a little hard to read with the gradient.   go with razor lines to highlight the links.  This will make it more readable and reduce load time:  razor lines compress more easily than a gradient.

site guide graphic is much too big.  it doesn't serve a real purpose except as a visual cue.  shrink it down a lot.

ditch the "Page" and "What you'll Find..." text, just provide the page name and context.  Switch the links between the two.,  you should always click a page name, not the description. for that matter, you can lose a lot of text on the site map. Just stick with the stuff under the "I Want To" column, lose all the rest.  and lose the "I want To" text. combine all the content on that page in that manner.

oil & energy graphic same as above.

On amost all sub-level pages, you provide a list of links at the top relating to the page content. following the list is a truckload of whitespace. while I'm a big proponent of "whitespace is our friend", it's a bit much.

"About NEFI" has 2 headers?  Lots of whitespace. shrink the secondary graphic by at least half and consider repositioning. Perhaps combine that graphic element as a part of the various page headers site-wide.

Ummm.... let's see what you think of that so far, and perhaps I'll chime in other other factors later.

ain't none of us web d00ds ever had to deal with appeasing a boss. 

I remember one site I did for the agency I work for, the iteration prior to the current one, that was so graphically heavey and butt-ugly.  One boss dug it becuse it was full of noisy shiny crap. Loaded fast on his machine, of course, since he was looking at it from within on a 100MB network.

dial-up users took over 45 seconds for the page to load. 

Page layout (I assume you mean printed) is a whole different critter, and it's too bad it's so hard to convince narrow-minded twits of that.

Razor lines (that's what I call them): Look at the navigation bar on apple's website for a damn fine example. those little dark lines on the light background. You can reverse it, of course.

another thing I'm a fan of is liquid layout, where the page fills the width of the browser window regardless of the size. keep the over all table at 100% (or even 95%), adjust the navigation to float in that area, keep any columnar navigation on the right or left (or both) at a set width, make the content area liquid.

the worst problem with your boss is that he doesn't trust your knowledge for web design.  you need to convince him (gently and carefully) that he has you because nobody else knows how to do it. the best way os to somehow change his mind while making him think it's all his idea to let you have almost complete control. That's just my opinion, and its fairly hazardous. YMMV.