I would look into working on the font type and sizes. I suggest the following site for good information on this concept: http://www.efuse.com/Design/web_fonts_basics.html . Also, the brown on brown is a bit dull. Perhpas having some whitespace or a dark backgound with white text in some areas could spice it up a bit.
The site felt a bit incomplete to me when I first saw it. You might think about putting a masthead across the top that can grab people's attention. Also, the user and password box seemed really small. Overall, I think you would make it feel more lived in if you increased your base font size. Either that, or think about posting articles with a bit more text in it, and then playing with the line spacing. The contrast between the content text size (small) and the ad text size (medium) de-emphasized the content for me. I think if you made them the same size, it would help you. Best of luck with your site, and I hope that these tips were helpful to you!
I don't know if is a good ideea but you could change the ads background. Make it like page background
Looks good, needs a header maybe some gradients to spice up the content? This is one of those sites that could be shrunk to 760 width and benefit
The site looks quite well, love the medieval touch. However it would be nice if you would put the link to the forum index in a more visible place, as most of the time a visitor will most likely browse before registering. Hope this helps. Regards, George
Took a while to load for some reason (on DSL) and I counted 7 images that were not diplayed... and there were no alt tags for them..
None of the images displayed I'm afraid. Whilst I can understand the colour scheme - does make it look a little 'dull'. I would definitely add some white space - this will make it easier to read too.