Help with Button dropping slice!

[gnarlysurfer]

Dear All

I am new to this, background in Oracle, baby forced change of career. Anyway, our first website is up and I'm having problems with the buttons along the top horizontal toolbar. The website is www.chocolate-fountain-directory.com, when you click on a button, the whole thing momentarily dissappears as you move to the appropriate page. How/why is this? The buttons were created in Fireworks and exported to Dreamweaver. The error does not appear when generated on my local site so I guess this is some error with the browser rendering the Javascript, as I'm new to this I would appreciate any help. Also, comments regarding the site as a whole are welcome, I'm thick skinned! Thanks, Gnarlysurfer!

Edit, seems to work a lot better in Firefox!

[gnarlysurfer]

Throw me a fricking bone guys, someone give me some kind of response please!

[ukgeoff]

Ok. Here's a bone or two.

Have a look at you site in Opera - Oh no you can't.

Go back to basics and learn to design and build standards compliant web sites not forgetting accessibility issues.

[gnarlysurfer]

UKGeoff, works fine in Opera, in fact, the error with the button only appears in IE6. Any ideas, they would be welcome! Also, if you've got any further comments about the website, please state them, I'm thick skinned so you can be brutal!

[ukgeoff]

I know it's a site about chocolate but for me it's too brown. Restrict the chocolate scheme to the header bar and top navigation.

The code doesn't validate through the W3C validator.

Your foreground/background colour combinations are not accessibility friendly so would never meat W3C guidelines.

Don't use frames.

It's too wide to fit in a browser on 800 x 600 without a horizontal scroll bar. An absolute no-no. If you are going to have a fixed width layout, it needs to fit this size which means your max width for the layout is about 770px. Alternatively have a fluid layout that can adjust to different screen resolutions but it must still work for this size.

For some reason, the 'Location' bar doesn't change in FF when you role over it???

BTW. I've tried it in IE, Opera and FF and I'm not seeing the problem you mentioned.

[gnarlysurfer]

Thanks Geoff. I'm working on the WC3 compliancy, should be finished tomorrow, points noted about the background and we are working on adjusting them to a much lighter colour to increase the contrast. I've developed the site using layers, my guess is that this will restrict it but how would I go about creating a 'fluid' site? I have tried it in Firefox and Opera and it works fine but I'm still getting the problem in IE6 so I guess it is due to the browser rendering the code.

The locations button should now be fixed, any further help would be much appreciated!

[ukgeoff]

You still need to get rid of the frames.

Make the left navigation look more visually lightweight.

Use divs to divide your layout into a header, centre and footer. Further divide the centre into a left and main.

Give your left div a fixed size and let the main take up whats left.

Seperate your images into individual ones and position them alternately left and right and throughout the text to add interest.

Don't use italic as your main font style. Its hard on the eyes to read on screen and should be kept only for emphasis. Use a sans-serif font such as Verdana that was designed for screen use or something similar.

'Location' still not changing colour in FF.

Background colour much better.