The coding is very well done, but as a designer there are lots of things I would recommend changing. I'll keep this constructive, and as always take my advice with a grain of salt - it's your design, so you do what you feel is best.
Top Navigation Bar:
At first I didn't notice what this was - The two small links are both redundant, and you can probably remove this section entirely. It is a usability issue to give your audience more links than they need to access at any given time.
Animated GIFS:
This is probably my biggest concern. As a design rule, animated .GIFs haven't been considered part of a professional design since the 2001-2003 era of websites. Putting them on your site these days will cause your audience to assume the website is that old, and is less likely to trust your content to be accurate and relevant.
The other issue is that your client base will probably consist of a larger number of disabled users. If they are unable to view the images (blind, poor eyesight, etc.) then they will be frustrated at not being able to view all of your content - and unfortunately may move onto a different site.
The image also stretches based on the size of the page, which is another concern. Users like consistency from one page to the next.
"# of visitors" counter:
This is another design rule that has been unofficially enforced for a number of years, now. Look on popular sites today - google, reddit, this forum, etc. - visitor counters are a thing of the past. If you want to track visitors to your website, your web host should have tools to do this; generally speaking you don't want your audience to know how popular (or unpopular) your service is.
Embedded Audio:
Don't do this.
Using images for text:
This page is a good example. Again going back to the fact that your audience is more likely to have issues viewing images, these scanned-in images of newspaper articles are going to cause problems. If the newspaper they came from has a website, put a link directly to the story. If that's not an option, save the image as a document and allow the user to download it so that they can print it if they need to.
The other issue is that this increases page load times. Google now uses the time it takes to load a web page as an indicator of whether it is a "good" website or not - if it takes a long time to load, it will have a lower page ranking and people will be less likely to visit your site when they search for similar sites on google.
Pre-rendered graphics:
Gradients are another design element that have been phased out in the last few years. If you remember in microsoft word 2003, most of the options for word art were different textures and gradients - If you look at word 2007, and now 2010, most of those have been replaced with simpler color patterns. The truth is, design trends will shift between making things look more complex and more simple. Right now, we're progressing towards simpler designs (look at apple, IKEA, google, etc.) and overuse of gradients, textures, and color will appear distracting to most users.
I really like the background image that you're using, but I would only use one gradient at the most on your page. Think "less is more."
Inconsistent Fonts:
Your contact information below the webpage is a serif font, probably times new roman; your font for everything else is sans-serif. I like the sans-serif, so changing your contact information to the same font as the rest of the page should be an easy thing to fix.
You use white text on a blue background for various titles through the different pages - I would recommend using the same color blue for all of these "titles." You could also put them in consistent places on your page.
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I'm currently working on a project where the last designer was an average designer but a horrendously awful coder. Design is much easier to change and fix than bad code, so you're in pretty good shape. There are more things I would recommend changing as you go, but for the sake of not overwhelming you, make some of these changes and we will be more than happy to continue giving you feedback. I remember my first website, and it was much worse than this
Best of luck,