Modifying the blog's look

I have been modifying the look of the entire blog, in order to do three things.

1. Load the page faster on slow connections--the picture of the planet was large and took long times to load on slow connections
2. Make some of the text more readable (I noticed that the link in the sidebar was the same color as the background)
3. Modify everything else so that it looks better (i.e., gives feeling of depressed button when hovering over the navigation bar, which is proving to be difficult with Blogger)

There will be some more changes, which may take awhile becuase Blogger won't let me upload my own code (specifically my CSS and modifying the underlying HTML so that my CSS works with it).