Thanks everyone for the feedback.
For those mentioning the issue with the two homes by each other. I'd be happy to change it, but the issue I'm running into is that I can't change it to something long like "forum home" or "back to website" because it'd take up too much browser width for users running small resolutions. I could use other similar one worded terms such as "main", but that that'd be confusing as well.
I move the bar over to the right a little bit, maybe that can help a little for now until we come up with something else.
It's a cleaner look...but the background fade makes it appear busier than it actually is... How bout if it faded towards the bottom of the page instead ? ?
I played with this, moving it up and down trying to find the best fit. I moved it back down as you suggested and I'll let you all decide what you think works best. I added this because with just white or a light color seems even more distracting. We can continue to play with it.
... One minor adjustment I personally would like is having a direct link to Recent Forum Posts separate from the dropdown box. As a "high count" contributor it's the "button" I click on most frequently. Not a big deal, but one less step (as it was previously) would be appreciated.
Instead of a new button I made the posts button simply link to the page you requested. So if this button is clicked it'll go directly to that page, give you what you'd like while saving space by not creating a new button. Hope that works.
EDIT: Nevermind, I figured out that the drop-down menus don't work with IE6. That explains my confusion.
Yikes IE6.
I'll see if I can maybe adapt it to work with older browsers in the future, once everything is tweaked to the communities approval.
Finally, while updating these changes I also removed the mail count after the Inbox that had ( xx / yy), where xx was new messages and yy was total in the Inbox to a new system. Now when you have a new message the total new message count will show up in red. Otherwise this will remain empty to keep the clean look and help reduce horizontal width limitations.
As always I welcome any other thoughts and suggestions. I would like this to be a clean, easy to understand and use feature, and at the same time be more powerful than what was available before.
