Before I start, I should give a brief background on my previous exposure to the web. I worked for IBM Research for 28 years and I am well versed on the internet and the web. In fact, I was one of the first to see a demonstration of the "grandfather" of the web browser called Mosaic. I believe it was around 1992-3 time frame, and I was attending a technology demonstration to members of our group by someone familiar with this new application. It was not called a browser but something like hyperlink. I was very impressed with this program and saw the potential right away. At that time, we were in the middle of a project with the Vatican Library and were designing an application to be used by scholars worldwide to access high resolution scanned manuscripts for study. Our joint project with CWRU and Pontifical Catholic University were to develop a system based on the Gopher protocol. A research paper was written to describe the whole project.

Unfortunately, we were too far along in our development to change and this new HTTP protocol was not ready for production. If the project was done 1 or 2 years later, there would be no doubt we would have gone with a web based solution.
In fact we have done numerous projects since and have developed award winning systems such as the State Hermitage Museum. A paper was published in the CACM that describe this work.
Populating the Hermitage Museum's new web site

Anyway, I am well versed in the web and web design and my expertise is with digital imaging processing. I am familiar with web design and what constitute a "good" site and the "standard" practices of a web site designer.
When I first came across Squidoo, what attracted me is the ease-of -use of the system and the fact you don't need to know about HTML or stuff to create a decent web site. Of course this has limitations to the design of the page and the concept of "modules" makes it both easy to use but forces a template style design. There is nothing wrong with this and in fact for some applications, it is perfect. It allows the common person to create web sites that would have cost much more effort and dollars. That is one of the key to Squidoo's success.

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