FEATURES:
* Retains almost everything except for that seriously lame fake ad box masquerading as part of the site. Seriously, Kyle, is SMBHQ just about how much money you can make now? Learn some class, man.
* Makes better use of horizontal and vertical space.
* Sub-sites (which are more popular than most of the other links) given better position in bar.
* Content organized in three neat columns.
* All the things with form fields lined up in a neat row.
* Advertising kept strictly separate from page (Seriously, Kyle. Your ads don't belong in the content, if you truly want to make a site people will visit.)
* Uses 90% of Sean Kelly's stuff, just re-arranges it (So there's nothing to get upset about)
* Hit counter right next to thing which tells people to look at it
* Better looking top graphic (that one was always the best)
* Buttons all near one another and not awkwardly split up by whitespace so people will actually be attracted to them by their flashy colors
* Ticker given its own box to highlight its existence
* Centering and alignment used to vastly increase coherency of page layout
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So as you can see, this layout increases SMBHQ's readability without losing anything, including the things Sean made. All that's lost is three very lame links, and the ads are shuffled to the edges of oblivion, where they belong. (Really. People can go to the Mario Wiki if they want. They're not going to slavishly view all those ads when they have an alternative. It's time to give up the massive cluster-f#$% of ads and join everyone in the 21st century.)
This doesn't handle the wildly mis-matched states of the pages linked by the bar, but if this were adopted, it would turn a field of disarrayed objects into a functional design. What do you think?
Compare it to this and give me YOUR opinion!
I will, however, say even the current layout is infinitely better than THIS layout, for there's only one really lame ad, instead of several.
