Hmm I like it but one thing I dont like is that while reading the front page its a bit hard to keep my eyes on on left side column of the page with out being destracted by the right column You need to find a way to seperate the two. Also this is just me but I always hated navigating using drop down menus.
As for C4D's post. Well what can you do. At least you dont have a useless splash page and force your user to enter a second page that takes 45 min to load on a 3mbit connection. yay