Feedback on Fishing startup: FishBlab

I'm not formally a designer, but I fancy myself a fairly decent UX/UI guy and think I can offer some basic suggestions.

1) In your header, I would keep the Fishblab logo where it is, move the "Map Driven Fishing Community" tagline up next to/under the logo, and move the Login/New Account creation to the upper-right corner. Then, move your menu down to where the tagline and login currently reside. Right now, there's a lot of wasted space where the menu could be, and it seems awkwardly balanced to the left.

2) Remove the huge "Fishblab" logo in the main section. It's redundant, and doesn't really do anything for the users. What to put in its place? Add something for the user to do, like input their location or a type of fish they're looking for. Or, make this space a dynamic feed for other site content, like photos and forum posts.

3) Minimize your use of tag clouds. These were cool a few years ago and you still see them a bit today, but users may be overwhelmed at the sheer amount of them on your homepage. Think of your most prominent use cases for the site, and mold your homepage content around that.

4) Move the menu in the main section (Photos, Catch, etc.) over to the right or left side and turn them into actions the user can make. Instead of "Photos", make it "View and Submit Photos" or something like that.

5) Please, please allow for authentication from other sites like Facebook and Twitter. This will increase your trial and retention rates and allow you to leverage the size of those networks with your users and gain greater visibility. Let people tweet stuff and post stuff to Facebook!

6) Not really a UX/UI thing but it'd be really cool if you pulled information from each state's Fish & Wildlife Department website. You could probably write a fairly simple program to pull this info and dynamically display it on your site according to the user's location.

I could make a dozen other small suggestions but they'd mostly be nitpicking and personal opinion. Overall, I really like the concept and see a real need if there's nothing currently in this space (well, even if there is). I see you guys as a sort of "Yelp for fishermen"; you could probably take a few design and functional cues from their site to kickstart the ideation process.

Cheers and good luck!

I am no designer, but what I did is find a nice looking template on http://themeforest.net and modify it to meet my needs. Tabs, split windows, jquery sliders, quite a few of the templates us the same elements. Just find one you like.

Some people see fishing as a serious activity, others as a family activity. You can tailor the look of the site to either demographic. For the family theme, adding a nice "mascot" like a puffer fish could help. http://graphicriver.net/item/puffer-fish/102251

Can you try mine? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2689356