Mike pretty much hits the nail on the head with his post about Gather.com. I heard about the site a few days back, and like always, I headed over to check it out.  Within thirty seconds, I was already clicking off the site and heading back to Bloglines.  The design is too cluttered and hard to read, and like everyone else, I had no desire trying to adapt my browsing and reading style when it would take a ton of effort to do so. If your site has a poor user interface and is hard to discern where the content actually is, you’re going to have a rough go of it in trying to get readers to not only check it out once, but keep returning.  The real money on the web lies not in getting thousands of people to your site in one day but in keeping 30 to 40 percent of those eyes returning to your site on a daily basis. Having dedicated and loyal readers will often translate into bigger advertising dollars because firms realize you have a core readership of people who will check out your site every single day rather than hitting it once and never visiting again.

First impressions are everything, as I’m quickly learning while designing the templates for my upcoming network.  As the old saying goes, you only get one chance to make a good impression; companies like Flickr are a perfect example of that.  Gather should take a look at the past and overhaul the UI before moving forward, because that’s one major roadblock that stands in their way.