HubYub.com - Shopping

by the way, this site was optimized for Internet Explorer. Once it is finished I'll fine tune it for Netscape.

(woop's I quess i could've hit Edit)

First impression - looks pretty good! A few things to fix:

The catch phrase under the logo. "What do you want to do?" - is 1. chessy and meaningless 2. too close to what other sites have used and 3. doesn't accurately describe the purpose of your site. I would change it to something like "Going shopping?" or "Your online shopping directory"

Change the font to a sans-serif (like verdana) - it just looks a whole lot better on screen. Also, the orange text on white background it a litle bit hard to read, as is the orange on blue background.

Something should be done with the blue block at the top - it's visually separating your logo from the rest of the page. It might help to make the blue just behind the navigation there (and change that nav to white, and make it bold) instead of having it behind the banner ad too.

For the quick links on the right side, you need to indicate that those links are going to other sites. I would probably put "Auctions at Ebay", Shopping at Storerunner.com (this one would probably be particularly confusing since yours is a shopping site).

That's it for now!

In the version of NS that I'm using (4.5 on a Mac) the background is a default grey because you haven't specified a background color. From the rest of the page, it appears you intended it to be white.

You need good meta tags to get listed and ranked better at search engines. This isn't going to get you far:

There's about a 3/4" gap below your blue ad banner container and the "Store Directory" text. Wasted space. I'd close it up.

The spacing before and after your headers is willy-nilly and inconsistent.

Frankly, I don't see enough content to convince me to consider using your site as a portal. If I'm looking for something, I'll get a lot more options with a quick google search.

Good luck with it.

I really don't like looking at the blue and orange. It's a little hard on the eyes. Do you have to stick with them?

Your menu under the logo would look better as gifs rather then raw text. There is a lot of room under your banner too. If your not going to expand your menu perhaps your whole top bar could shrink? I think it would look better smaller.

The site just doesn't come together..at the top with the hard angles and some rounded..Change the colors..the mouse over effects could be better.

1. Change your text to a sans-serif font like verdana - this will help the overall look to the site

2. Change the colours if you can. Stick with the blue (a good all round colour!) but change the orange, very hard to read for text and the blue text on the orange background doesn't look too appealing either. Perhaps white as the contrast colours on the tables & top links & a different shade of blue for the other text?

3. Change the top of the page. It looks like it hasn't finished opening, with the curved bottom part the part with the logo/banner looks odd. Either put it all into a rounded box or just the top links.

4. On the quick links part - make it clear that they are external links.

5. When looking at other pages, About Us, etc. you really should have more content (it may be that you haven't finished these parts) and on the Privacy Policy the top part looks awfull as nothing is lining up properly (IE5). On the Awards - what was the award for? It looks a bit daft having a whole page just for that.

Not bad as a starting point but what are you trying acheive with the site? There are so many portals out there that unless you give visitors something exciting & different they aren't going to stick around, if they find you in the first place!