Web Template | Need advice.

Ok, I'm more of an HTML coder than a designer, so I'm currently learning the design point of web design. I whipped this up in photoshop, but I don't think it has a good flow.

I'm looking for some advice, or tips, basically anything that helps me! ^_^

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take the 1px white border away.

Change the drop shadow to directly underneath rather than slanted, and weaken it.

Make the nav bar links same side as header, if your design is to stay the same.

 

Terribly rectangular, whilst the coding side of web design is entirely based on rectangles, the design can be manipulated in such a way as to give the illusion of non-rectangular, to hide the visibility of obvious tables. but more specifically with your design:

1. Make the drop shadow on the background much less obvious, it is too much of a drag on the design.
2. make the navigation on the left, that is the best place usability-wise, and give it a more involved look, text alone as navigation is so old and boring (it can be a good design choice, but not usually).
3. The design is extremely monotone, use some colors to break up the monotone nature of the design.
4. Fix the issues with the extremely rectangular-orientated design, it reminds me of a cheap-ass $2 template.

If you'd like, I'll mockup how I'd envision your design to be improved upon, like I did for NaughtyGFX, and give you the .PSD (Give me the pattern you used for the background though, I lost all my patterns in a format)