Next time, please make your URL clickable: http://philippedecor.com/
In Firefox, I also see a tiny bit of the background showing through the menu, as you can see. Mousing over this thing triggers a mouseout event, closing the menu. In IE 7, I don't see the push-down effect, only the hiding of the menu under the Flash panel and everything below it.
To prevent the menu pushing down other elements on your page, you should use position: absolute
on #downmenu
and probably incorporate it into the div containing "Main Categories" to position it in the right place. Use an appropiate z-index
will likely prevent the drop down menu from popping under another div in IE (untested, as I don't have a debugging tool for IE at the university where I'm typing this message now).
Furthermore, I think you shouldn't use two menus containing exactly the same content, that can be confusing to visitors of your site (actually, I didn't read your post well enough and moused over the left instance). Also, you shouldn't put text in images without providing alternate texts, screen readers and the like can't "see" it this way (preferably use a suitable image replacement technique). And all those
s in the li
s are totally unnecessary and not according to rules for semantic HTML; just use padding
on them or something. By the way, you should make the rounded cursors of 'Main categories' transparent (now two little white corners are shown). Just my $ 0.02...