New Layout - please have a look, and comment

This is something I've worked on this weekend. I think I'm going to change me website over to it this week.
I know the corners and the bottom slice of the body need some touching up on their transparency, but what do you guys see?

Also, right now I have it on a black background...simply because I couldn't decide on a background color...

which brings me to this question that I'll prolly post in the correct forum if it doesn't get addressed here... "How do you change the body background color on the fly?" Is it painless? I've seen site do it, I just never took time to look at the source to see how.

Anyhow...here it is

http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbutts/site_portfolio/cb_orange/cb_orange.html

let me know what ya think.

Cool Man. I like it. Nice and clean. I don't really know woudln't you jsut change it in your HTML editor. I don't really know what you mean.
Top marks dude.

A nice orange, but the red dots make it look dirty, it isn't a very eye pleasing texture.

The rounded buttons in the top left corner are a little hard to read and I think they could stand out a little more. I also don't like the mouse over for them, the inverted colours just clash.

What are you planning on using the gaping rift in the left hand side for? Menu and links? You might try a rounded rectangle there, the rest of the interface uses rounded rectangles.

The Cbutts design in the bottom left corner is very hard to read, it might just be the red dots I mentioned earlier or it might be the pillow emboss on the Cbutts.

The links in the main text section look good, the rounded bars look a little grungy, I don't like the texture on them.

Why did you decide to put the text in columns? Looks rather like a newspaper.

Should be a good looking site.

An orange site I am working on.
http://malbolgia.2y.net/stevetest/newicons/1.jpg [large file]
http://malbolgia.2y.net/stevetest/Layout13c.jpg [large file]

Hey Chris,
Nice layout. The texture kinda looks like a potato sack, other than that, pretty cool.
Good work my friend.
Later,
Justin

nice work Torn, the colors are nice.
The texture doesn't disturb me that much.

And Cbutts design really is hard to read (at the top and at the bottom also), just as Czak told you.
My opinion is kinda like his, except for the texture.

p.s: Czak that site looks great! Just put it in the showcase so more people tell you their opinion.

Hey torn...

I like it.....I have a hard time reading the Main logo (cbutts?) . Not a criticism but more of an opinion, I'm not crazy about the orange color.Other wise, cool, let me know when the links work....I want to check it out.

I think a very pale brown would look good as the background color. Very very pale. Maybe for the part you have grey now as well. You have the wood look going on, then it's just grey. I agree that the inverted colors on mouseover just aren't fitting in very well.

As always, I love your filler text.... It's almost as good as 'blah blah blah blah blah'. Or what was that other technical term you used? Hanky panky or something? Yeah.... that was great.

Thanks for the comments.

"gaping rift in the left hand side"

I'm gonna put as many links to this TPS site as I can in there...but it just keeps getting bigger ;) ....LoL... Really: it's for 88 x 31 link graphics...

The top Cbutts thingy...

Its not really a logo, it is just a link for the idea of letting the user "see that thing roll over to the weird looking colored one and "if" they click it *Javascript* or something changes the background color.
Scenario:
They come to the page and the BG color is black (or whatever).. they click that mysterious thingy and "poof" the BG color is that very pale brown deker was talking about. "Hustle-Bustle" ;)
See what I'm saying?

The bottom Cbutts thingy:

Hell I dunno, It's just something I have laying around handy so I toss it on everything.

Texture:

Like deker said its a spin-off of the wood texture I had on something earlier.... I did put the little dots on there in places for a little depth, but only on the flat surfaces.. and I kinda like em.

BTW - how were the loadtimes?

Load time was about 2 seconds for me on DSL. That fits my attention span nicely.

I don't know how to do dynamic changing of background colors, but I think it's possible. If not, you could always just reload the page with a new color. But that may require a lot of hustle-bustle. And no one likes that.

Ok, I found a piece of code that does what I want to do...only it does it randomly and it doesn't seem to like anything but standard web colors and it has like 15 colors to randomly change to...I really only want like 5 to 7 to cyucle thru(I think I can tinker with it and get what I need) ....but check it out...

Click the top -"eyeball" looking thing- (as my wife said) *shrugs* ...I don't see it, anyway.

http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbutts/site_portfolio/cb_orange/cbo.html