Here are some comments for the admins as suggestions to improve what I think is the rather poor design of the new Marketplace (IMO). I offer these in a constructive sense rather than just as criticism; no doubt there are many other ideas people have that are better than mine.

1. The page appears to be fixed-width. As a result it looks different from the rest of the site. This shouldn't be necessary - you can make this expand/contract to fit the screen size.

2. There is a nice logo on the top left but it should by convention link to the site home page. I expect this an inadvertent omission rather than deliberate design.

3. There is a banner to the right of the logo which is not the same height and as a result the page looks (to me, anyway) odd and unbalanced. If you must have a banner it should be in keeping with the rest of the page top. Be nice if it had rounded corners to match the logo, as well.

4. Do I need to know how many members are online? No, I don't.

5. The button bar below the banner is fine, except that it doesn't stretch the whole width of the page section which contains the thumbnails; so there is an odd 5-10 pixel gap either side of the button bar, which looks really poor. (I'm using Mozilla 1.7 BTW. Maybe it's different in IE?)

6. There is a Search button and also a Search text box. In fact, both do the same thing, but if you click the Search button it takes you to another page to do it! Unless you're planning to use the separate Search page eventually to design an expanded search facility, who needs both?

7. Aarrrrgh! Why the dreadful default HTML buttons next to the search box and two drop-downs? You use graphic buttons just above these - why not do the same here?

8. Then there's another two what are, in effect, button bars, but not graphical - this time all text but with different designs for each bar! For decent appearance, consistency is vital. Small, well-designed graphical buttons would look so much better and surely there's no need to worry about the extra bandwidth on a site of this kind?

9. Product thumbnails are of different sizes. I mean, come on.

10. Why is is necessary to have that tedious row of pages 1 to infinity repeated on the top and bottom of the page?

11. Just above the tedious row of pages there's a link named 'Top'. It takes you to the top of the page. Um, we are already at the top of the page, unless someone uses a screen size of about 100 pixels high... seriously, this is just a wasted line.

I could go on, but if you could fix these issues it would look a whole lot better. Maybe this is a just a temporary design to check functionality - I hope so, because although this is not a site devoted to web design, it really should have a slick, attractive (I might say beautiful) interface if it is going to attract people to it.

Steve