I finally got towards the end of this today. Took me 2 days to get this far, but its pretty simple now. I plan on adding a border and stuff for the tables, maybe add a scrolling banner, and some other stuff. The 1st box is a shout-out. The 2nd box towards the bottom is for affiliates, and the rectangle box at the footer is for social network links. Making it was easy, but lets see about coding :p.  Any ideas or suggestions on how I could improve its appearance?

I would use css3 border-radius for those rounded corners and also try not to use a lot of images as they load second to structure stuff. Also I would not use a table on a single thing you have on there. I would suggest using div's instead with the appropriate floating and display. Feel free to post any questions regarding this in the Web Questions section.

Also you can use dummy text instead of the "asdf" stuff. I like using this site to get it: http://www.blindtextgenerator.com/lorem-ipsum

Like what you've done so far.
Give us the niche of your site so that we can share our suggestions/opinions.