my "web designer mentor" (i suppose you could call him) impressed upon me certain tastes in web design a few years ago which appear to still remain prevalent. although i'm not all that capable of designing it myself, i like very professional looking sites (generally like what you'd see on a large corporation's site). anyway, they usu. stick to just a couple colours in their banners, with fading images, and fading, somewhat-submissive horizontal lines are also very popular.

while perusing the web i stumbled upon this site and i find their header rather attractive; it doesn't employ the horizontal lines or fading images i mentioned, but i think it still looks pretty good (aside from the buttons being too tall). when i find some time i'll try and find some other examples, but i think something like that would work pretty well here... any comments/thoughts? i think with a few changes here and there throughout the rest of the site (like table cell header backgrounds) we could tie everything in to a new banner such as that.

oh. some of you will be undoubtedly happy to know i'll soon be copying their 'forum activity indicator' images (on that page they are little triangle-arrows in a square box) to replace ours (or i'll be using this site's triangle-arrows in circles).