From Gray to Blue

I don't think I've ever posted a preview of a website design to get some opinions, so I thought I would give it a shot. I've been working this a little at a time for 1-2 months at least.

I'm in the process of redesigning the site for my comic at- [link]

While there obviously are limitations to what I can do, I can really just write the code however I want, and then have to add in a few tags.

The comic recently switched from B&W to color, so instead of a muted palette, I feel like the site can now be colorful. Also, looking at the site stats, I think that most visitors can view a website wider than 800px (the width of the comic) allowing a sidebar beside the comic. Also with a poll here a little while ago, most seemed to prefer not a light or dark page, but something in the middle.

It is a comic page, where the main content is a large image, so I didn't want to slow down the page too much with a lot of images. I've kept the navigation and menu css-styled text.

The Collective of Heroes recently designed a rotating banner, instead of their image-heavy tall list of banners. I'll add in the rotating banner, and then include text links below.

I'll also include each of the comic links that also appear on the links page as text links in the sidebar. I'm trying to decide what links I should include or exclude. On the site currently online, I have links to big comics who I can't imagine would ever reciprocate, don't have a links page themselves, or who might not even notice any traffic I might send to them. Along with comics that link to me, I've considered adding in some smaller comics (more equal to mine). Over the years, a lot of the comics I've read have either died, or I've lost interest. I've been meaning to replace them with other comics, and I'd prefer to link to comics I actually read, so in adding smaller comics, I've been trying to find smaller comics that I like, and that I actually intend to read. (On that, "Monster Soup", one of the comics I've planned to add I noticed just linked to me today)-

[link]

What's holding this up (unless there are opinions to change things), are mostly the subpages. I want to write longer bios for the cast pages, start setting up the gift art page (starting with at least the three pictures for the current version of the Pulse). I also have to work out what to put on the links page, as well as come up with leaderboard banners for those comics (I'll probably have to make some in many cases).

Does it look good, bad, or what? I thought about voting incentives, but I'm not really a gimmick person. I thought I'd just add a large vote button beside the comic and see what happens. I've never really tried voting incentives before, or even voting in a top list before this comic I guess.

There are more buttons that need to appear at the bottom of the page, but I didn't think this preview required it.