Also, if I may suggest.. http://kuler.adobe.com would be an excellent resource if you are confused regarding color combos.
I guess that's the truth for most of us out there. @!nfamous: The advertisement space does look too big and you might want to try and play around with the fonts.
try using farther option when extracting a character from another image. it makes it look less pixelated on the margins.
Nice job for your very first design. You should look into to some techniques to improve typographical hierarchy. Like using different font sizes/weights for different areas like nav/headers/and content to separate them by purpose and function.