I’m a part of ReviewMe and just love it. Advertisers find sites relevant to their products and pay those site owners for a review. The reason I like it is that you have to disclose the fact that the review was paid for, you’re under no obligation to accept the request and you don’t have to write a positive review.

As you can imagine, though, members get requests from some pretty weak sites from time to time — most of them sites developed purely to make money from AdSense and/or affiliate links. I always decline those reviews simply because I don’t want to give them a link at all, even if it’s to say how lousy their sites are.

On first glance, I thought this latest request was going to be one of those. I saw Poker Table and Poker Chips and was quite sure this was just another affiliate site trying to capitalize on the poker craze. Then when I first looked at the site, it only seemed to confirm my suspicion.

For some reason I hung around, though, and as I dug deeper I changed my mind.

The first thing that caught my eye was that the site had a PageRank of 5 and an Alexa ranking of 232,743. Those can be highly misleading, but in this case it indicated to me that the site wasn’t just a front for some fly-by-night operation.

The second thing that caught my eye was the 1-800 number — in big, bold red letters just about as prominent as you could make it — a very good indicator that this was a reputable site.

So in light of those factors, I decided to accept the review. What they’ve asked for specifically is comments on their design as they begin a redesign of their site, so here’s what I think.

First, the 1-800 number is excellent. Arguably nothing inspires confidence in buyers like a prominently displayed toll-free number. That’s a definite must-have for the new site. Adding other elements like this to establish trust from the buyer would be very valuable as well — maybe a TrustE, BBB and/or BizRate logo, along with any other seal or award that conveys that this company can be trusted.

My next impression is that the design is very dated — definitely a holdover from the late 1990’s. That said, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Sure you want to update the design a little bit, but I don’t think this site would benefit at all from a “Web 2.0″ design, and might actually suffer.

I say that because the interface is just so usable. I’m able to easily find all that I’m looking for, and I’m not confused by the navigation at all. I would definitely keep the simple, catalog-like interface that the site has now. How many poker table buyers need to see a site with the latest 2007 features in order to convince them to buy? I’m thinking it’s about zero, and I think some “new-fangled” site, if it wasn’t done extremely well, might actually alienate buyers and cause them to go somewhere else.

So my bottom line is that I definitely would update the look, but don’t venture too far away from the current interface just for the sake of a new design. My experience tells me that the current design is probably losing them next to no customers and is probably leading to a much higher conversion rate than most sites like this.

What do you think? Have I misjudged this? Is it heresy to suggest that a dated site like this doesn’t need a complete redesign? Take a look and let us know!