Markus's dashboard

I just came across your site, and I think it's a great idea (I am actually considering using your site for my company), but IMO your visual design has a lot of issues. It's not clear what's important. Stuff is scattered around and it's hard to parse out the important information. For example:
1) The forum page should clearly emphasize the forum content (posts),.e.g by a colored background that draws focus to it. Right now I don't know whwre to look at. It seems the list of members on the right is more important than the posts on the left!
2) The '-' (collapse) button should be way bigger! It's ridiculously small right now.
3) The link bar ("# All Topics(902) Questions(654) Ideas(47) Problems(174) Talk(27)") should be way more obvious! It is the central widget on the page and is dwarfed by all sort sof colorful, big, unimportant icons on the page!!
4) The button for post creation should be right there, in the post area, NOT underneath the search bar!! Took me a while to find it there.
5) In general I think your icons are too big - they take too much room so less useful information fits on the page.
Just my two cents.
Thanks!
Markus