design - How to not make my website have a "1990's" look

I recently launched a comics website, www.hittingtreeswithsticks.com, which I created from scratch. I created my own design because I wanted to keep it unique, and used no templates.

Unfortunately, people who've looked at it says it appears "outdated" and "from the 90s", but haven't really been able to pinpoint how so. I was wondering if people could help me "modernize" my site without presenting me with downloadable templates. I'd still like to keep this my design, but I guess I need some artistic/design pointers.

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DESIGN EDIT:

Okay, I've spent some time redesigning the template given your feedback, and found some great ideas on http://designshack.net/articles/layouts/10-rock-solid-website-layout-examples/.

I have two main templates I'm going to go for: (keep in mind this is just for layout... so none of the fonts, colors, images, or dimensions are set yet)...

Either:

A) Two column template

• 
  

  Search is on top and will expand down a bit with search results

  
  


• 
  

  In effort to get people to my artwork sub site, I'll include latest artwork on top right

  
  

Or

B) 3 Column template

• 
  

  Search is on the right and will expand downward as such with results

  
  


• 
  

  Gives more room for advertisements and other links

  
  

And this is the proposed, although minor, redesign for the View All and View Image templates:

View All: displays all images with archive-able dates

View Image: displays single full size comic

![enter image description here][4]

Any thoughts would be great!

[4]: http://i.stack.imgur.com/2qsff.png 1: http://www.hittingtreeswithsticks.com

Answer

1990's design is a symptom of a poor design aesthetic driven by the fact that computers were at the time constrained by what the end user could handle. This led to design with three main flaws:

• loud color choices designed to be "web-safe"


• poor font choices often involving Comic Sans, Papyrus, or Viner Hand ITC, as these were three of the "fanciest" fonts that happened to be installed with Windows and thus were considered web-safe (as they were on nearly every computer)


• table-based design with hard borders and bevels

In order to get rid of the "1990s" look, you have to avoid these three things. Fortunately, we have ways of fixing that.

• To fix poor color choices, design your site in black and white first, and only then add colors as needed to emphasize certain elements.


• To fix poor font choices, use webfonts that allow you to pick fonts that users don't have installed on their machines. Google Web Fonts has an awesome collection to choose from, and for your images, the Oatmeal has a good short list you can use as a starting point, and Blambot has an awesome collection of fonts designed for comics.


• To avoid table-based design, learn to design with divs that allow you to do many of the same things you used to do with tables, but don't suffer from their problems. Oh, and... you can do without the beveled borders. Seriously.

Once you get the hang of it, it'll not just fix your web design -- it'll make your comics look better too!