Web Design is Hard

I hate my new design. Perhaps hate is a bit of a strong word, but I'm going to stick with it for now. For anyone who has been to my site before, you'll notice not much has changed. The page is a little wider, the blues are slightly different, the right navigation bar is now a left navigation bar, etc etc. All in all, a pretty small list of changes, but it took me 4 (procrastination filled) days. Four stupid days!

There was once upon a time where I considered myself to be a bit artistic and creative, I would spend days drawing and painting and playing around with Photoshop and video editors. When I first started up this site, I figured I would get up something workable, and then go back and fix it later. After all, how hard can making a personal website be? As I now know, it's stupidly hard. I would like to think that I can tell good design from a bad design, but having the ability to judge is completely different from the ability to create.

To be honest, these past four days I have had no idea what I was doing. Fuelled by my hatred of blue color schemes, I looked at everything from here. This site is a trap for all of you non-designer people. I went in thinking "Oh man, all of these color schemes look so good!" so I ended up trying all of them on the site. They all looked terrible. Maybe I'm not doing something right, but bright colors are useless in my hands.

Design Choices

Colors
I would like to say that I chose these new colors for a specific reason, but I would be lying. I still don't like blue color schemes.

Sidebar
It's pretty much the same, but on the left now. It's also fixed on the page now. I couldn't manage to get it fixed and on the right at the same time, but this part I think works ok.

Miscellaneous
Home and Blog are now the same page (my home page was useless)
The page is a little wider (800px was too small I think)
The background is now an image (because solid colors are boring)

I guess what I'm really trying to say is... designers are useful. Help me fix my site.