bedroom: design thoughts

I am not skilled in graphical design. I'm a phyicist, and I know *nothing* about what makes a webpage good; all I know is what I find pleasing, and for all I know, my tastes may be abyssmal.
 
More importantly, what may be clear and obvious to me as the unskilled designer may not be obvious to the user.
 
I've tried to keep a few things in mind over the few days I've been revamping these pages:

• Visual clarity: does the text show up? are the unviewed links more eyecatching than those that the user has already followed?)
• Accessibility: it must be easily viewed in lynx (even old versions), in addition to common graphical browsers.
• Uniform appearance while maintaining extensibility and ease of update.
• Leanness.
• Good html: no overuse of tables, deprecated tags, etc...

I have the hardest time judging the first two. How has the site looked to you?
 
    Please send me feedback.
 
There's one thing I'm still not sure about... my old page had all my links in one place, formatted by nested UL's and anchor tags. This bothered me because it looked messy, and it was getting long. The new design breaks it up, but it means a whole lotta clicking to get to things which used to be linked from the front page. I don't know how to balance these, so I'd appreciate feedback on this, too. Feel free to compare to the old version (but beware, this is a snapshot so some of the links will be broken).
 
And... since this seems like a good place to say it, my code validates cleanly according to W3C!

One other question: I've been looking at the CSS specs for defining style for aural browsers. I have some idea of what I think makes a good visual web page, but I have no idea what works and what doesn't work for the spoken page, and I'm having a hard time finding any resources to help me with this. Help!