http://www.thetopsites.net/

My site is http://www.thetopsites.net/ which is a web directory. I would like to know your opinion on this. Thanks

HTML Validation
CSS Validation

Other than that, to be honest, I see no reason to go to the site. There are waaayyy too many directories out there, including Google, Yahoo. I'm sure Microsoft has one somewhere. Why would anyone ditch those for yours?

The design is fine though. Except for the new windowed links. That's never a good idea.

Whatever your reasons for creating this site, the layout is clean and easy to follow. I think you could add something to make sponsored results stand out more, different background color, red title, etc. I wouldn't pay to advertise because it's too easy to look past those top listings.
Give them a reason to advertise. Get out there and market your web directory. All you need is something to set yourself apart from the rest. You'll need to start crawling the web (a search for DJ yielded mostly chinese character results.)

That flashing banner ad at the top is a bit cheesy too. An ad would be OK, but flashing banners make it look cheap. IMHO

I like your design, loaded fairly quick on my dial-up, the colour scheme is pretty good.

And i agree what 'tameone' said, that banner at the top makes it a bit cheap looking, but overall, good effort

Thank you very much for your feedback. I will move this banner asap. Anyways it doesn't have any good click through ratio.

About the other questions, the catch of this directory, is that it has a very complex rating algorith. We get ratings from other sites plus our user's ratings in order to rate a site, and it seems that it working good.

A good reason to visit a web directory is that you can browse a lot of simillar sites without using search engines (propably all the results for what you asking are not correct in a SE)

By the way it is a very good way to get traffic for your site, and webmasters love them. My site is up about two months now, and we have allready send 60000 visitors to other sites. I think this is a good number.

Thanks again for your feedback.

I stand corrected. Those are pretty good numbers.
If you can make it work, all the power to you my friend.