Have you read Jakob Nielson's work? - http://www.useit.com/

Designing Web Usability would be a good start - http://www.useit.com/jakob/webusability/

And Homepage Usability is good for screenshots with examples - http://www.useit.com/homepageusability/

I would take what he says with a pinch of salt at times, as he can be very metric based. Sometimes it helps when to know to bend the rules. I remember for years he was very strict about hyperlink colours insisting that they should always be blue for unvisited and purple for visited.