I would ditch the highlighting buttons and go with simple text links, they look kind of cartoonish to me. I really don't like the blue bar along the side, (though I've never been a big fan of gradients maybe its just me) I would just ditch the side bar altogether and go with the white background content of the site taking up the space. Maybe even split the content in to a few other pages. I feel like i scroll down on the page forever.