David Abrahams wrote:
How about using the same blue as the headings for both linked text and menu items? The menu headings could be switched to black to maintain the color contrast between the menu headings and items. Both text and menu links could be underlined on mouseover. I also agree with someone above who said that the menu headers shouldn't change on mouseover. The change says "link" to users and should be avoided unless that's what it really means.
Beth, your proposals sound interesting... but they'd be a whole lot easier to evaluate if you'd just make up the page or CSS stuff required and post it where we can all get a look at it.
Done. The test page is up at http://bajac.com/boost/ I made a few additional changes, most notably increasing the menu text size which meant there was no longer room for the mouseover pointer image, and I had to shorten "Boost General Interest" to "General Interest" (under "Groups"). If either of these are a problem I could shrink the text back down and put them back. I wanted to make the text size large enough so the similarity between text links and menu links would be unmistakable, but maybe the color alone would be enough.
Finally, and much less important. it might be nice to have a different link color for visited links, at least in the text and perhaps for the menu as well. Especially for someone exploring the libraries for the first time, it's nice to have a visual cue to tell you where you've already been.
It looks to me as though wikipedia does that, but it so subtle that I can barely see the change. At least it probably won't upset those people who *hate* the changing link color effect ;-)
I went for subtle but clear. Hopefully people on various OS's and browsers can tell me if I succeeded.
Also, on my machine mouse cursor briefly changes to hourglass when moving on the link. It looks like it was flickering.
That could be solved by preloading the image with javascript. I noticed there's no js on the page and assume that was by design, but maybe an exception could be made in this case, since there'd be no added penalty for people without js. They'd just be subject to the same hourglass/flickering they've got already.
Care to contribute the code to do that?
Rene noted that the flicker only occurs on IE. That being the case, I doubt the fix I had in mind would work.