There a 2 discoveries I made:

1) if auth_signup is ever used, you need to manually add the website.user_navbar to the view of the group that the user is created. For signup users using the auth_signup process, the user will be assigned to the  group_portal user group. So adding the nav_bar there, would allow the black navigation bar to appear, allow the user to navigate to other modules, e.g. customer portal

) The other discovery I made was either 2 accounts Hr.employee (and the rest of the groups) or user_portal (with website.navbar) will be able to see the navigation bar and navigate to the respective custom modules I create. Now if I would copy and clone either the account for my customized signup user. It would not work, and I could figure out why? As a part of my work around, my signup process includes assign the user with group_portal and then a customized group type that I intended for the customer.

    @http.route('/market/signup/customer/', auth='public', website=True)
    def customer_sign_up(self, **kw):
        # GET Request
        if http.request.httprequest.method == 'GET':
            return http.request.render('elm.customer_sign_up')
        # POST Request
        if http.request.httprequest.method == 'POST':
            print "POST"
            self.do_signup_customer(http.request.params)
            return "Customer user created"
    def do_signup_customer(self, values):
        # Retrieve all fields from values
        email = values.get('login')
        name = values.get('name')
        password = values.get('password')
        confirm_password = values.get('confirm_password')
        # Check if password and confirmation match
        assert password == confirm_password, "Passwords do not match; please retype them."
        # Check login field for valid email
        assert re.match(r"^[A-Za-z0-9\.\+_-]+@[A-Za-z0-9\._-]+\.[a-zA-Z]*$", email), "%s is not a valid email address." % email
        # Check if login(email) exist
        count = http.request.env['res.users'].search_count([['login', '=', email]])
        assert count == 0, "User already exist, please try reset password"
        # create the user if all assertion passed
 
        # Get the reference of customer group and portal group
        customer = http.request.env.ref('elm.group_customer')
        portal = http.request.env.ref('base.group_portal')
        # Create User
        http.request.env['res.users'].sudo().create({
            'name': name,
            'login': email,
            'password': password,
            'groups_id': [(6, 0, [customer.id, portal.id])],
        })