SITE REVIEW: stockfuel.com

nice work, and beautiful looking, fit to IT customers.
A lot sample works are great, make me want to try it ~:)

Its been a while since I wrote a site review so hey why not this one. Besides it just got bumped to the top of the list

The site looks reasonably nice, but from a usability standpoint there is way too much, very large navigation on every page. Your header takes up approximately 1/4 of the vertical space (standard window) and the category/side nav takes up about 1/3 of the horizontal space leaving very little room for the actual content. In essence what happens is that all of your nav overshadows the stuff your trying to sell. Second from a user's perspective, the navigation has no visual priority. Click-able items (categories, user tools, search and sort) are visually similar in both size and shape and therefore don't provide any direction for a potential user. Its the design's job to guide the user through suggested actions. The very large number of navigation colors (icons, buttons, textfields) also really compete with the content, making the site look very cluttered and IMO very hard to browse.

I think you should look at every element on the page, or at least groups of elements, and define a priority. What should the user see first, second, third, etc. Then use the elements of design like size, position, color, etc to help achieve that priority. One simple step would be to remove a large amount of the color/contrast from the header and side nav. It might not be a bad idea to let all the icons be grayscale until you roll over something. Basically I would do everything you can to make the product the most important part.

Second, while I'm on the topic, the subnav flyouts in the side menu look like a lazy after thought. Why are they white with a solid border, straight corners and a light gray highlight when everything else on the site is all rounded, gradiated and dark? This may not be the case (and I hope it's not) but this type of treatment screams "I modified a template and couldn't get all my nav to fit so I just threw that in".

Overall I don't mind the dark background, since most of the content is dark, although I can see the contrast issues that some people have pointed out. I think if you address the amount of color and general contrast ratio issues, the text color contrast might not be as big a deal. The problem is when you combine the bright white of the search/sort/login with darker text, the highest contrast object, the white, is what everyone will see first.

Overall, I think your close, but your targeting an audience that has a very discerning eye for design. I feel like some tweaks could really increase a user's willingness to browse the content and in turn increase your sales.