Rene Rivera wrote:
When the same issues came up during the design, many months ago, I went trough many, more than 30, variations to try and find that color you are searching for now. I ended up with the current design where using color for links just gets in the way of readability, regardless of color. Hence why it's using underlines, and leaving the text color uniform. Unless the link status can be seen from the context as it is on the sidebar menus, where everything is a link and therefore don't have underlines.
I was afraid of that. Still, as much as I hate messing up your attractive design (and I really do - I can imagine how much work it must have taken to make it look that good), I'm convinced the usability issue is big enough to justify the change. Black text with blue underline just doesn't say "link", and when I first saw the page I didn't even realize the menus were menus. I assumed that they were some sort of informational text. I'm hoping my changes have made these things a lot clearer without seriously harming the aesthetics.