New Layout Idea

So basically I had a chat to my tutor about my design and he sugested that:
A) It was a bit dark on the background.
B) That the mid section of the design(the coming soon bit) was a bit to large and taking up to much screen space not giving the text(body copy) the correct placing on the page.
Original Design


So based on those ideas I came up with this:




After deciding I really liked that last layout I searched goodle for a non-flash way of creating that elastic menu thing hoping to make one prefferably out of CSS.
I found two solutions:

http://www.phatfusion.net/imagemenu/index.htm
http://www.artviper.de/ImageMenu/

the both use css and Javascript but I like the way they work and they are easy to implement. I have only found one problem so far and that is that the images have to be a set size it one is smaller it treats it like a background and repeats it rather than just going to the size of the image. Which would mean that if ever used something like this for a client I would have to explain that all images must be the same size(could limit the usefulness of it to).