derektoigo.com Homepage v2

This is a particularly lovely web design, and there's a ton of simplicity to what you've built, and in that way it's also beautiful. I do, however, think you're missing some tricks and details which can improve this design and make it far more functional.

First, the primary navigation is tiny, and its placement as a right-justified layout means it won't have as much visibility as you'd like. At dA we've looked into placement of nav elements and we've begun understanding with much more clarity that the elements which are at the top-left of a layout really do get seen and used more than anything else. So, I suggest you move your nav into a more appropriate place and enlarge the links.

Second, your header image. Looks very lovely, but there are a few problems with the elements in there. The Next/prev button makes no sense–it should be two separate buttons. This button also should not be visibly identical to the "view all of my work" button because the two do conceptually different things (one shifts pagination, the other takes you to a larger gallery).
This header area is also lacking in contrast. I would try using a slightly broader palette than just white/gray/teal. You need a focal color–a color which contrasts with everything else and is used sparingly to highlight important elements. I think a red tone would pop especially well.

Third, your secondary header text (about how you build simple, clean and valid etc etc etc). Looks nice but is too many words per line. Try to keep any block of text down to somewhere between 7-12 words per line to ensure maximum legibility. Anything above that or below that starts reading strangely. The use of teal here is also problematic, since the value of the teal is somewhat similar to the light gray behind it. If you squint your eyes at this text block, you can see how the teal almost entirely disappears.

Lastly, your 3-column elements are nice, but they shouldn't be equal in size and content. The "Who Am I" and "My Services" columns are far more important than "Follow Me On Twitter." I would make the twitter area smaller and less important, and scale the other two columns up in size and general dominance. This also gives you the benefit of more hierarchal variation, which is important in a layout to ensure people remain interested in what they're looking at.

Generally, like I've said, I like the look of this, but I think there are quite a number of improvements which could be made to ensure this is a more successful design.