Sure. I think starting off looking around for sites you like and then doing something somewhat similar is fine. I don't think it gets sketchy unless you're tr

Sure. I think starting off looking around for sites you like and then doing something somewhat similar is fine. I don't think it gets sketchy unless you're trying to confuse customers or perhaps if you're knicking things off of a direct competitor. When we did our redesign a while back we came up with a list of sites that we liked. The one we took the most from was frogmetrics, and you can still see notable similarities: http://www.frogmetrics.com/ http://www.frogmetrics.com/ http://www.directededge.com/ http://www.directededge.com/ (Notably, that's where I got the idea of having something interactive in the center-right.)