More dynamic portal page?

[PowerStroke]

Hello. I own a fairly popular green industry forum. I often travel other green industry web sites and I am jealous of what I see with their portal pages. I use vbadvanced as my portal page, but I want to add more graphics and reorganize it, so that it is easier on the eyes and everything is layed out much more nicely.

The pages that I see that make me want to re-do mine are:

Lawnandlandscape.com
landscapemanagement.net
grounds-mag.com

My site: Lawn cafe.com

Lawnandlandscape is the one I would most want to model my portal page like. What I notice that makes it look better is that everything has it's own section, placed in table like formats. Pic thumbnails, logos are placed properly and buttons and banners are layed out in a way as to not be so intrusive to the lurker.

What I would need to do is reduce the size of the font, logos, place the buttons and banners off to the side and top, and reduce the size of each area.

Is it possible?