looking for some tips on creating a better logo and border background

If you dont want to hire a designer, heres a suggestion, keep everything simple... the simpler the better, use either contrasting colors or colors in triad for combinations... Use only a maximum of three colors on a site not unless your site is about m&ms or skittles...

These minor suggestions are for any design actually, but keep this in mind always... Ive read through and studied many books and articles, these seems to be the very basic notion.

As far as your site goes, I use Firefox and it seems everything is overlapping and some portions are blank...

Yeah I saw your ad for creating logos but i'm not sure if your style really fits my site, I dont really want some cartoony thing for my logo

I cannot duplicate your problem with firefox -- when i re-did the design recently I made sure its working in IE, Opera, and Firefox. If you have a firewall or internet security or ad-blocking program that hides the referrer http header from my server it's probably not showing you any images, maybe thats what you're seeing? Please PM me a screenshot if that's not the case.

Anyhow, thanks for the advice about the colors, maybe I should make it dark-green or something. Either that or grey... I was thinking of making a 3d or shadow effect with it, but that's probably beyond my abilities.

For the logo, start by finding an interesting font. There are tons of interesting fonts out there - look for something that you feel suits your site. If you know what kind of attitude and message you are trying to convey you should find a font to match that. To go with the font, find a symbol of some sort to put next to it. Dingbat fonts are good for this. Again, somethng that matches the message of your business.

In Firefox, try playing around with the font settings and colours until you find something you like. DO keep it simple and avoid dramatic drop shadows or other effects. If you're going to use any special effects they need to be very subtle.

I'm not sure about that border. I sort of like the idea but I'm not sure what would work best there. Even a solid colour could be something to try. It would be nice to see something that contrasts more with the background. I think putting the pale green in the outer background instead of the grey might be a good way to make that border stand out more too. I really like that navy and pale green scheme

K.I.S.S. is the order of the day. I have just been looking at some so-called award winning web-sites, and they were pretty much basic/basic. In fact REALLY basic.

I would darken my background to blend in with the border a little more, if it were me. But hey! don't listen to me, I don't know what I am talking about half of the time. And I am not really sure the rest.

It do look decidedly different in FF, and IE6. FF has the two columns stacked on top of each other, IE6 has them side by side on the page.

weird, i'll have to look into that. for some reason it displays as expected on firefox for me... what version of firefox are you running? i have the latest non-beta one.

that "select a category to browse" green box is a nested div with the style 'clear: both' set -- theres no way it should be where it is on your screenshot!

I am using the latest release FF not beta. Heres what the page looks like on my machine, notice the two rows. And of course as you might guess, the page is real long.

heh ok, what screen resolution are you using steve? at least yours looks okay, as i would expect it to be at a low resolution at least. that other screenshot is seriously fubar...

800 x 600, but it looks ok on my desktop at that same resolution in FF. I copied it down to a temp file, but the temp file does not have all that incription in the head. I'll look again @ 1024 and let you know if there is any diffrence.

ok, @ 1024 both paragraphs are at the same level, but there is a big space between them, same thing in IE6. And the incription is there, I just did not see it @ 8 x 6. What is that anyway ???.

asp.net web pages have that weird stuff in the head, its probably just to keep people from messing with the cookies and submitting stuff to the page incorrectly (trying to hack the web page or steal your password or whatever from your cookie).

I never really designed the page to work at 800x600. Having the blank space between the two sections isn't so bad, is it?

I wonder if it works. I guess anything that made its way through all that, would be pretty disabled. Anyway I guess the space is normal.?
What is the primary resolution supposed to be.

Well its not there at 8x6, like I said on my desktop it looked normal @8x6. Both in FF, and IE. It only looks funky on the internet in FF.

It actually looked like a site that was 8x6 but viewed in 1024 on the desktop.?

Well the encryption should be 100% secure since it's advertised as a feature of asp.NET 2.0
It's basically a complicated sounding way of ensuring nobody can tamper with or read potentially sensitive information that is being sent back and forth between your computer and the web server.

BTW I use 1024 x 768 res... Have you tried validating? it can show some minor errors that might have caused this problem...

yeah i might be able to make it pass validation without too much work... i swear your browser is broken though, lol. if i use MY firefox on that page it works fine, even at 1024x768. Do you have a really old version of firefox or some weird ad-blocking extensions?

either that or your FF has the problems... but I dont have any ad blocking and I use the newest FF... and if my browser is having problems, im sure it wouldnt look all the same in my 5 other PC with FF in the network, but it does look the same...

uhh ok well i guess your 5 PCs beats my two
i'll see if i can get this damn thing to pass validation at least, if your firefox is somehow more picky than normal i suppose that might help.

Ok well i got it down to 1 error in like 5 minutes work... it's just missing an ID tag on the image map, and stupid asp.net doesn't seem to have any way to fix that!
I also fixed the MIME or Content Type to be "application/xhtml+xml", but then firefox and opera dont render the page properly - the fonts and colors from the external style sheet dont show up for some reason.
Ok well i fixed that, apparently css becomes case sensitve when you change the MIME. Now IE won't render the page though... *sigh*
This is what sucks about web design - you change one little thing and everything breaks!

possibly, if you do have the html or css for this, I might try and help you make it look the same in all major browsers...