Need Help w/ critiquing on my website.

Ahh - well I could tell that modx was not really the base for your content after looking at it a bit. This will probably be a problem in the long run, but whatever works for ya!

I am a graphic designer who works in print, internet and architectural graphic design.
I’m new to this forum and have limited technical knowledge, so thought your thread was a good place to share my thoughts on something I do know a lot about.
I haven’t had time to carefully read the other posts here, so apologies if I’m re-stating anything here.
My graphic design thoughts on your site are as follows.
Generally, try to think about how you want people to think about your site, try to come up with a statement along the lines of ’this site is the best/coolest/most friendly/most fun/most up to date etc place on the web to find out things about/be involved with/etc topic x’. The aim of this is to give you a clear idea of what you are communicating, and who to.
You can then make design choices on what will promote this idea, rather than what you, me, or any other critic thinks about the site. Your aim in design should not to make me or other critics, or even yourself, happy with the design, but to communicate a position to the audience. Might sound overly dry, but thinking like this is very liberating and helpful.
OK, so that’s the general thing out the way. Here are some specific comments you may like to consider.
- Headings on the posts would work better if they were more different to the text.
- More images in the posts would be more engaging.
- The buttons in your header are cool but maybe too dark?
- Do you need the intro ad, or the Windows Live banner, can they be moved elsewhere?
- White can be very hard to use well if your design does not have lots of empty space.
- Think about ways of making it look cool without resorting to 3D effects.
- Maybe think about ways of making it legible without using so many boxes.
- As some one who has no idea what your site is about, it was confusing at first. Can you make a space somewhere near the top that says what you are doing on the site?
I hope that’s kink of helpful, looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

Well, I’ve started fixing up some of the issues that were present in the intital iteration of the layout.

The "alignment" issue with the nav and the content is fixed (still working on fixing the nav/content banner issues), as well as removing some unneeded images to reduce the image loading needed on each page.

Looking back on it, I think I’ll just be fixing up some of the issues you guys mentioned, and then adding a "lighter" color pallete via a CSS switch (since everything’s controlled by that in this layout) --- IIRC, I remember seeing a snippet on this forum to do that.

Next up will probably be the nav/content vs banner issues, making the console icons "lighter", and moving WLPE to that space in the banner --- I’ll probably have a drop down menu for the links, so it doesn’t take up navigation room. Also will probably reduce the amount of "current" news articles, and add a "see other updates" link.

Thanks for everyone’s suggestions so far, btw.