Replying to NS redesign attempt

Hey all,

I've been on NS for quite some time and the website functionality has grown immensely since I joined in 04. So have technologies and how we interact with social communities.

The biggest problem area I find is information hierarchy on the site, as more and more elements have been added on and few of the elements have been removed, therefore resulting in a cluttered layout of the site and inconsistency across home,media,forum and other modules.

NS has a limited staff and budget and is not Facebook or Twitter and you guys have done a kickass job at keeping NS on the forefront of the ski community. But it's a website that we dearly love. So, since I had a couple laid back days at work I figured I'd take a stab and resolving some, in my opinion, problematic areas on the site.

First, the latest home page. I understand it's a huge canvas for advertising, but I feel it's a little overwhelming and has made it impossible for me to enjoy the content(especially with splashy ads like Saga's). The layout I'm proposing is designed on a 960 grid and is actually about 40px narrower that the current website. It still allows for standard skin+leaderboard+bigbox website takeovers, but eliminates massive spacing between each "article/photo/etc", which create the biggest visual conflict.

Secondly, the header and navigation area have been redesigned and modelled after now commonly used icon-based profile navigation. Please see the drop down screenshots to see how profile/friends/quicklinks can be accessed. I'm not sure which features are used more by users, as I don't have any data, but I think that "logout" really shouldn't occupy that much space as it does on the current site.

Home Page:

Drop Downs for navigation:

As for Forum, I actually quite like the way it functions and find it quite readable. The elements I addressed are pagination, header and breadcrumbs navigation. I've always loved the members online section on the left.

Forum: