Trying to Spruce Up the Website... Ideas?

The website's new look. (Oo... Ah...)

So the image above is of the website that my group is working on.  This website is for the final project of my digital civilization class.  Our teacher asked us to make our sites worthy of being shared with his peers.  Well...  I spent some time on it today and I think it looks better.  Any additional ideas?

The website's old look.  (Boo.... Ugly!)

Besides making the site look nice, my group and I need to add content to it.  One big frustration of mine right now is that Google Sites do not allow you to use Java script codes or embed things they do not approve of.  (In other words, editing the html code of the site is a nightmare!)