Goonto.com starts off with a professional splash page dominated by an image symbolizing a network of people and containing a brief description, highlights of the service, sign up button and log in. Footer provides links to the frequently asked questions, terms of service and a contact form. The style and presentation of these pages is also clean and professional. In short, first impressions are great, but this is just an entrance.

After signing up and logging in, which is pretty quick and easy, we are greeted with a very slick interface with a main menu at the top with a greeting, logout link and a search box, sidebar at the right and a facebook-like bar with friends and status at the bottom.

The main menu items are drop down menus for applications, profile, connections, jobs and an inbox. The applications menu provides links to the bulk of Goonto's capabilities; groups, polls, events, blogs, photos, forum, history of employment and education, recommendations, marketplace and videos. The profile drop down menu offers links to edit the profile and photo. Jobs menu leads to jobs in UK and US and inbox drop down contains links to the message compose page, inbox and outbox. The menus are therefore organized very contextually and cleanly and wont inspire any confusion. There is also a distinct settings menu linking to account and privacy options.

The sidebar starts with a web conferencing block that allows user to start or join a meeting styled with icons representing the types of meetings that can be held; meetings, presentations and training. It continues with profile stats, application overview with icons (matching the links in the applications drop down menu), status update block with an ajax functionality allowing immediate update of current user status (User is ) and a couple of network related blocks. The first network block lists people in your network and the second one provides ways of expanding the network by finding or inviting new contacts featuring a neat image of an expanding group of people.

Overall the interface appears very uncluttered, appealing and simple to use. The rest of the web site consistently follow the same design style putting everything in its logical place, without any clutter and simple to use. It is somewhat like facebook, but even more streamlined. It is hard to find a fault as it is clearly professionally designed, well presented and usable and therefore deserves the high rating.

Design rating: 10/10

Focus:

The splash page makes the purpose of Goonto.com quite clear, as a social network of professionals. It's design and style matches that message. Only the site's name, "goonto", sounds somewhat dubious and will probably need help of a clear slogan to pass in any marketing effort. Unless "Professional Network" is meant to act as a slogan, a creative slogan to go with site's name and be displayed in the header (at least on the splash page) might be helpful.

That said, the similarity of the members area to that of facebook will probably further help make everyone feel right at home, while enjoying the benefits of specialized socializing of professionals that it is meant to facilitate.

Focus rating: 9/10

Content:

Since most of the content types (applications) allow viewing only the content of the currently logged in user it is hard to gauge how much content and activity there actually is on the site overall. However, the nature of this site is such that the overall amount of and even quality of content doesn't matter as much as for the public content oriented sites. All content that does exist is for the purpose of internal networking between individual professionals. Therefore the content review may at best focus on the perceived number of people using this service and the content types that exist.

That said, the groups listing shows there are 28 groups of people, most with less than 5 members and there is a great number of forums with a great variety of themes, but most with less than 10 threads. But considering that not all members may form groups and that only a fraction may be posting in forums this is inconclusive evidence as to the overall activity of the site. I'll then let this information, for what it's worth, speak for itself and leave the content unrated.

Suffice it to say, though, that there are plenty of content creating opportunities, even if you share it with only a select few contacts. You can write blog entries and articles, upload photos and videos, create polls, post ads in the marketplace and participate in the forums mentioned.