I was recently invited to review a website by our sponsor Soaps.com a site that does an excellent job of covering Soap Operas.  The site has been up for about 5-6 months and is looking for some constructive feedback.

Right away I noticed that the site is content rich and this is a huge plus.

I also noticed that there are some slightly distracting layout designs about the site that could probably help visitors find that great content giving them more reason to come back and helping the site to earn more money.

Here are my constructive suggestions to make the site even better than it already is (recognizing that accumulating and creating great content is nine tenths of the battle, so my suggestions will only be some of the icing on the cake.)

1. Remove the top most banner from the site, it is detracting from prime content real estate and slows people down from getting stuck or hooked on the site when they visit.
2. Move the editors block and picture to the lower bottom right hand side of the screen.  Its a good thing, but return visitors will want to see new stuff and not the same factual details about the editorial staff
3. Move the surveys, polls and other interactive aspects of the site to the place where the editors block is located.  Use these sections to get people hooked and to get them into the site past the first page -> More impressions per visitor!
4. Throw in a small flash video block somewhere again so that people get that nice hook when they show up and to break up some of the bulletized text link headlines. 
5. Consider pulling in an RSS feed of the latest posts in the Message Forums and scrolling these live on the front page.  This will help people notice the forum and the comments might draw people in to participate in that same forum, thus generating interactivity, stickiness and lots of impressions.

That's my top 5 and I think Soaps.com will get a lot of bang for the buck out of these suggestions. 

What do you think? 

Did I miss something or hit something slightly off center?