Working on Redesign and Looking for Help

There's nothing particularly obvious about the flaws to the outside. However, when creating new posts, I get a completely blank screen. Remote content creation (via XMLRPC and API's) throws plenty of errors, turning on caching seems to render a blank page on nearly every other request, etc.

So, to remedy both situations, I've been building up a parallel installation. I'm putting the entire thing under version control to better be able to track stuff like this going wrong and be able to undo it. I'm putting an entirely new theme into place in that new installation, setting up all of the plugins and generally making sure that everything works properly in the other directory. The plan is to, on an early weekend morning after all is good, swap them out and have it go as smooth as butter.

For the new theme, I really didn't want to do it myself this time. So, I hired a design company I've used in the past. They are pretty cheap, but I've been happy in the past. And, since this is a personal site, I'm not exactly up for dropping a couple of thousand dollars on a design. At any rate, despite something like 8 or 9 sets of comps and quite a few rounds of redesigns, I'm still not happy with the results. I ended up signing off on something I thought I could live with.

But, as I moved to turn it into a Wordpress theme, I just couldn't get myself to like it. So, I started putting together another design of my own. However, before I put much more effort into it, I'd like to get some feedback. Click the image to see larger versions.

If any of you are better at design than I am, I'd love some help. This site is starting to become something and I'd like it to be pleasing to look at and reflect the level of effort I put into content and my personal brand. I'm just more of an amateur than a pro designer.