[Madison]

I don't think that initial appearance really has much at all to do with how useful, navigable, or popular a website is or can become.

Content is of the utmost importance, superceded only by access to that content. User interface design is what's really important, not the way a site looks. Though, with that said, the initial impression one gets from a site my affect how long they stay there.

Yahoo! and Google are exemplar in their unique niches -- but remember that they have different purposes. Yahoo! is a web portal with many dozens of varied features, one of which is a search engine. In that case, having many links on the home page makes accessing the different parts of the site easier. The user interface design is intuitive because it immediately lets the user see if what they're looking for is available to them and moreso, that it facilitates easily returning to the site and being able to get to what you need with a single click.

Google, on the other hand, is nothing more than a search engine, really. For their purposes, there's very little else that the site does and so there's no need for an excess of links cluttering their main page. It works well for what it was meant to do and that's what's most important.

You can design the most visually appealing website on the 'net, but if it's difficult to use or lacks consistent navigation, it won't mean anything.

As an aside -- proper spelling and grammar is important, here and elsewhere. It reflects poorly upon you and your team if you don't take the time to proofread the things you've written for spelling, content and clarity. What use is having the most amazing ideas ever conceived if you lack the ability to communicate them to other people? Where I'm concerned, people that don't make the extra effort to spell something correctly, run spellcheck, search before posting, etc., are rude and lazy and will rarely get as much of my attention as someone who works at presenting themselves in an intelligent, professional manner.