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There are a lot of things to say about this layout - it's the first one that took me over a year to plan and code. As I have mentioned many times before, most of the improvements on this site have to do with its part-HTML, part-PHP structure. Through the integration of PHP into my site, I have found a way to manage the HTML content more easily than before. I'm grateful that I decided to "cross over," so to speak.
Many of you may notice that the banner is different from what I had actually planned it to be. When I started hard-coding this site over the summer, I was in love with the series Majutsushi Orphen ("Sorcerous Stabber Orphen"), and so my banner featured the rivalry between two childhood friends - Krylancelo/Orphen and Hartia/Black Tiger. The site was appropriately named "hizouko to sokkin," which can be translated as "the favored pupil and the right-hand man." As the school year began, I lost interest in Orphen, and fell in love with series such as Mushishi and Genshiken.
Ultimately, Ginko and his Mushi won the banner war; however, Madarame Harunobu won his own fanlisting (which I proudly own with my friend, Anchan). The image of Ginko that is on the banner is from the episode with the Ganpuku, and the Mushi are, well, I'll let you figure them out for yourself. The title of the new version 4.0, "The Reluctant Return," is named for the fact that Ginko always appears reluctant to return to a particular place due to his status as an involuntary Mushi magnet. The title also fit the image well - Ginko was refusing to stay at a lodge, and he was forced into it anyway. :P
The new structure of the site relies mostly on its backend; each page, before being shown on the server, is a lot cleaner in format, as they are broken up into many pieces. As much as I'd love to go into the details, I'd rather not; there are too many to discuss. I'll leave everything up to your imagination. Sadly, since I am but a novice at PHP...most of the stuff I did to fix the site up was complicated-looking, and yet simple; I don't know the short way around some things, and as a result I coded things the long way. XP