I find that it's generally better to stick to neutral colors for the background of a website (i.e. black, white or any shade of gray). If you wanna toss in some other colors, don't overdo it. Using a complex pattern like that counts as "overdoing it."

The content area (whitish, light-grayish stuff) has a couple of fundamental issues as well.

First off, it's unbalanced. You have a giant orb on the left and a couple of vertical buttons on the right. However, the orb extends out farther than the buttons. This makes it look a bit awkward to me. Try reducing the size of that orb and bringing it in so that the horizontal extension on the left matches the extension of the buttons on the right.

The entire area is horizontally too small. As far as I know, 1024x768 is the current dominant resolution. 800x600 has all but completely vanished. Even 1024x768 is dying out. Hell, most new computers come with a widescreen monitor anyway. It's best to keep this in mind. While that design may look just fine on a small monitor with a low resolution, it'll looks really cramped and needlessly small on my 1080p display. I'd recommend looking into the 960 grid-system. It should give you a good starting point.

The shading here confuses me. It looks like you're trying to add depth to this area, but I can't tell how it's supposed to look. From what I can see, it looks like the shadows are random. Shading can produce some incredible effects, but when not implemented correctly, it just looks strange. Here's what I'd recommend for fixing it:
1) Remove all the shadows.
2) Determine where you want your "light source" to be.
3) Come up with a "bump map" for the area. If you were to pull this design off the page and look at it in a 3D environment, how would it look?
4) Keeping both 2 and 3 in mind, add new shadows. Put them in areas where the light from your light source wouldn't hit as hard.

Your font selection for the title text is good. It fits the style of the design very well. The others, however, do not. Try to avoid mixing serif and sans serif fonts. Since the sans serif font worked so well for the banner, try using all sans serif. It doesn't have to be the same font, but try to keep the style consistent.

A black shadow on black text is a general no-no. I find that it makes the text harder to read in most cases. The only way to make it work right is to use a very very low opacity shadow on a very very light background. For the buttons on the right, that's not gonna work. Try experimenting with different ways of making that text blend in better with those buttons.

The menu is too hard to read. It's actually very hard to put menu buttons in an area like that. I'd recommend creating a separate bar underneath it or something like that, and dedicating it to the menu.

Those are the main issues I see with it right now. I can see a really good design coming out of this, but the details are what will tear it shreds.