I love this layout, check?
http://matt-lanter.org/amazingmattlayout.png

Jesus, lose that font. Quick. I just 'bout shot myself. That goes for both the navigation font, foreground font, and background font. I'd try a nice sans-serif font.

Oh, and maybe do something about that border. It looks iffy.

agreeing with pretty much mike said. the black and gray rectangle could also go away, because that really ruins the aesthetic in this pic, in my opinion. you have a pretty good base, just needa change some things here and there.



( if you really want to have them, just keep one of them at least )

Yeah, other than the text in the background and the font used for the title, it looks pretty good. Much better than that last one.

The backround font is so cheesy!
and that top grey banner looks bad....I would just remove that part