WEB LAYOUT MOCKUP - FEEDBACK?

I'm working on a new website for the Hive. What is the hive? Basically, it's my competitive Pokémon site that was developed from my irc channel, #hive. With the upcoming release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, we're extending the site to include an online league for that game as well (most likely the hive league will more or less become an rmxp.org brawl league since I know a lot of members here are anticipating it).

Unfortunately, the current layout REALLY isnt going to cut it. It's pretty much a wordress layout that I screwed around with for a few nights. The current Hive Website can be viewed here.

I'm looking to take things in a moder modern direction. It started when I was playing around with the logo here:



Next step was to transfer the new style to a website. The early framework can be seen here:



After that I had a pretty rad bout of inspiration and tonight I came up with this:



The most current change is this one: The black navigation on the side in the one above felt like a little too much, so I brought over the green box and made it a little more uniform on the sides. There's two versions, with the columns on alternate ends.




Then there's the even MORE current one, which I did after getting a little feedback. Basically a bigger navigation (not really happy with it), and google ads instead of a useless info box.



Basically I'm looking for comments, criticism and advice. The layout is the main thing here, but any other feedback on the site would be great too.

Currently the plan is for a static HTML website with lots of interactivity and member profiles done through the forums and forum modifications. That's obviously not the ideal route for this, so if anyone has any experience with php and is willing to help me out with that end, let me know.