That's much better.
Here's a rough idea, you could take the "Most recent news" headlines on bottom of the HP and restrict them to "other news" or "real news" only so you don't get as many hits/it goes back further, and make several narrow columns in place of the one wide, short column and make it deeper. then make the margins less wide, link recent abcu tweets and blogs and some vids.
I also think you'd get traffic if you add the different images to the notables and make it like wearethene.ws where it's smooth to read and see all the pictures, but yours doesn't go down when they do.