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.

Fine-Minds.com comes with a simple and efficient look that is uncluttered and easy on the eyes. There are however a few issues, even if minor. First, the free tour link doesn't seem to work, as it simply reloads the homepage.

The sign up button appears to be a text link on top of a repeated background image (of a button). However in Firefox 3 it looks cut on the right side. In konqueror (using KHTML, same rendering as Safari) and Midori (webkit rendering just like Google Chrome) the additional piece of the button is showing. It might be safest to make that background no-repeat. It displays alright on IE6 though, but in IE the sign in and remember me buttons display below the email and password fields jumping off the menu bar.

Finally, the footer area font color is too dark for the given background both for normal text and links, and also seems unstyled and as such extends across the whole width. It may be a good idea to prepare a container of some sort for these that would wrap them up more neatly.

The central part of the design is nice and simple. Artsy curves, flakes and dots in the background are also a nice touch.

The members area reveals a fairly clean, almost facebook-like layout, making good use of the dark bar at the top which previously only displayed the language link. The main blue menu bar works very well and also contains a drop down menu for more items. There is also a user specific set of drop down menus near the top of the central column. Everything seems to flow decently, from editing your own profile to finding others and navigating to other resources such as the marketplace, videos and games.

Design rating: 8/10

Focus:

The homepage does a fine job conveying site's purpose as a social network of business owners and entrepreneurs. It also highlights the three major aspects of what makes it potentially valuable; ability to interact with financial gurus, connecting with and advertising to like minded people and building relationships, all of which are consistent with what one might expect from a specialized social network.

Focus rating: 10/10

Content:

The site is somewhat hampered by broken links or 404 pages. The idea of having a free tour before registering is appealing, but the link doesn't work. In the members area the forums link doesn't work and clicking through to the only videos playlist available lands at a 404 not found error page. There is however an FAQ which may be useful and plenty of flash games though their purpose is somewhat questionable given the focus of the site.

Since this is a social network the bulk of the content is expected to come from members, but since this is a web site that was recently launched it is understandably still lacking. There is a single entry in the marketplace, one poll and a few blog entries, but Fine-Minds.com also allows posting podcasts, videos, photo albums, events and even applications which sets the stage for a wide variety of content that may be of interest to the business people community. Given that the community appears to be growing (there are new members nearly every day) the amount of content can be anticipated to grow at a decent rate too, which may warrant a passing grade.

Content rating: 5/10