We are talking about a lot of work here. While I am not opposed to it, I think KISS is in order here.
A few things to think about:
images, while pretty, can be fairly large. I've made this assertion before, but the current incarnation of SEN takes up nearly 1 MB, most of which is in the banner. We don't need 8 images when 3 will suffice. This adds a
large amount of data for people on phones, and in general makes the site slow to load if not using a cache, not to mention, probably increases server load.
Phones are becoming more prominent, and in particular, my phone sucks at viewing SEN (I honestly think it uses ie7, but definitely trident of some form) mainly due to the lack of mobile support (320x240 screen). I don't think it's all that necessary to include mobile support, but it's certainly something to think about, and will have a large future.
Our current layout, while not perfect, is sufficient. There are clear problems with the current code, since apparently there are things that are way too difficult to do. However, I don't feel we need a new design. If anything, we ought to bring back the old design, but have it so that it is easily customizable, possibly with a skin.css file or something like that. Simple sites don't look phenomenal or anything, but IMO sc2mapster's website is not all that impressive, I've always hated facebook's layouts, and the old SEN v5 worked well. Apparently something happened which ruined compatibility, but I see no reason we should change. We are still a starcraft 1 site in addition to a small sc2 section (which many people want to grow, which I know is the reasoning behind this change). If you guys can think of some ways to bring back the old skins (3 pictures, left center right in a title bar at top, one column on right or left with news posts wherever), I can go ahead and tell you that those worked
well and and many people were sad to see them go.
All that being said, so far MZ has the best concept, but I would really like it if we standardized a few things so that custom skins are allowed and available for people to use:
It's obviously far from pretty, but I removed a lot of the stuff because I'm lazy, something that wouldn't happen in a real skin.
So then, keep the banner at 100 px or so maximum height; use no images greater than 320 px wide unless it is aligned to the left; have the boxes be able to be resized to any length down to 320 px wide, and if there is no room beside it, move the next box below; Allow for a custom maximum screen width under preferences which lets you say how wide you want your screen (for the carbonite assholes).
"Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Chairman - do we have to call the Gentleman a gentleman if he's not one?"