My name is Nouman Saleem (@noumes), and this is my take on your site
Unlike last time, I'm not looking for a job. Simply just a mini project to keep me busy on a rainy day. I wanted to sharpen my skills by redesigning your site, but setting a time limit of just one hour. If you like what you see, it's free for you to use, just get in touch with me below.
So you must be wondering, what does it look like already?! Well, it looks like this
And of course, it's coded. Go ahead and see it.
The main issue I saw with your homepage was, it didn't SCREAM San Francisco--actually, I couldn't even tell it was for the city at all. This was my first target, make a design that resembles the city. So I found a color pallet called The Mission District and a picture on flickr (I lost the url. If anyone knows the owner please message me!). The main image isn't just part of the design, it's there to create another way you can interact with your users. SF has a large photo community, so, the idea is to run weekly (or monthly) competitions where the winning photo is used as the banner until another winner is selected. There is also supposed to be a content slider above the image, but I couldn't fit it within the time. ;]
The second point I wanted to target was the content. It is a mess! (I'm sure your readers agree). With my design, the user gets an easy to use view of all your content under 'overview' with the ability to click on a tab to see a much easier to read view of just that category. Though the content I used on the redesign is just mumbo-jumbo, it can really fill up considering the amount of content you write, yet still remain fully functional and easy to browse. You could even switch it to a two column, and add some mini post icons. Also you can sneak some ad's into the columns if you'd like.
Like I mentioned above, I had a very short time limit--and a ton more planned (which I'd love to tell you about)--but I feel this is a good place to stop and show what I made.
Let's chat about it
You can send me a message at http://www.myspace.com/nouman or message me on twitter
thanks for reading!
(special thanks to Eleven2 for hosting, Blueprint CSS and Megadeth, since I played that song on repeat 20 times)