Here's my thoughts on the theme itself, not your changes. I hope they prove useful to you. I am not trying to knock your design or anything, just give you useful constructive criticism and some areas I see right off that might be easy to change and should increase your design usability a ton.
That blue is odd. On some monitors it may appear more purple than you'd intend. I need to colour callibrate my new monitor soon. I'll let you know when I do and how it looks.
I like it, Thork, but I'd make the blue background much more pale. The vibrant blue you've got draws a lot of attention to itself when it has absolutely no reason to. The eye should be drawn towards the content, not away from it.
This seems like a reasonable idea. Our current site has that heavy dark matte that the site sits in. This, to me, creates a weird effect where you are both drawn to the content while at the same time drawn to the borders of the site. The issue is worse on larger monitors. A paler colour would do wonders. Or even an appropriate background texture, image, etc.
The white gradients look weird with it as well, especially when it fades to white on the borders of content areas. This serves no purpose design or functionality wise and looks out of place.
The dotted background images make the text harder to read.
The header image overlaps the weird white gradient while also leaving a jagged edge at the edges (not accounting for the curved corners I imagine)
Text for date is hard to read.
The font on the logo seems a little too ornate for this. In addition some of the tweening / spacing / sizing on it needs to be manually adjusted. It appears to be a display or graphical font as well. Its feeling also imo doesn't really represent the society.
Navigation bar is too tall for the text displayed in it.
Search area has different margins on the search input than on the submit button. Perhaps a taller input? Also it is, like the news (listed next) almost flush with the top of that div. Perhaps it would make more sense anyways in the nav bar.
News has no margin or padding to move it away from the top of its containing div. That whole area (and most areas) should have a unified or at least sensible scheme for padding and margin. It also appears to have different left and right margins / padding than the rest of that area.
It looks like you used a png for the header. I'd suggest using a jpeg with the appropriate color as a background instead. This saves download time and bandwidth as well as a few display issues on older browsers.
User information in the top left seems to be a different colour scheme and also in general just looks a bit out of place and style.
Border radius on the main content area differs from those areas contained within it. This, like most of these notes, are minor but when put together cause a real strain on the design and eye.
Balloons.
Remove white around logo