Site Feedback Please

Is this your site UK Business Directory | Human Edited Business Directory ?

If so i dont like the black boxes. I'd remove them.

It also needs a menu of some kind running along the top i'd say.

I had to post that link because the whole suffix thing was throwing me off.

yeah the boxes don't really highlight the text

Black. Looking very odd. make it simple and remove this color.

Black Boxes are annoying .. There are no informative contents just categories and title.
Submit website link should be near header or at a place where website visitor can find it at first view not footer.

Aieeeee! LOL, but seriously. What is up with the black highlighted text??

OK, first impressions - where the hell am I? There is no header text to explain what I'm looking at. I'd add some styling (for the love of apples, please!!) a header graphic followed by some intro text explaining WTH the site is, move your important navigation links to the top, and... well probably lots more, but I can't see past the black boxes right now.

You definitely need your business address on the About page. If you are running from home and don't want to put your home address down, pay for a virtual office service, it's pretty cheap.

In terms of the "anchor text" thing, I would say most business owners won't understand this, because they don't have much knowledge of SEO. You'll need to add a little pop-up help box which says "What is anchor text? This is the wording which we use to link to your site. Anchor text is important because, blah blah blah..."

I'm slightly confused on why your site is described as for UK business, but you've got non-UK business listed down the side?

As an idea to fill the content, why not offer a limited number of free spaces, say for 3/6 months, to businesses? At the moment I'm not seeing a compelling reason to list my business, given that I can't locate many other listings.

Sorry but here is one more chyme. The black boxes don't do anything for me. I can see that you were going for the trendy minimalist look, which I love too. But not every line of text should be that way. Maybe if you scaled the boxes down to just be used as the header/titles it might work better.

Thanks for the feedback everyone.
I understand what you are saying.

My idea behind the design is that it is lightweight, easily indexable, bold and different from other business directories.
Apart from submission, the directory is aimed purely at search engines and the promotion of companies through the use of anchor text links.
The website will never have adsense running.

This is the second version of the website. The first one accepted only free submissions. I gathered quite a lot of statistics from the first website.
I decided to start charging for listings and guarantee review within 24-48 hrs which is great if you are a SEO company and have to quickly show a client some results.
The fact that their are a lot of empty categories should be looked upon as advantage to anyone in the know about SEO.

Thanks again.

Yep - would have to agree that you need something other than black and white and the black boxes are very distracting.