On layout:
Space the page heading up so there's at least a pixel or two between the baseline and the top of the white body background, and space the footer stripes down a similar amount. I see what you're going for there but in its current state the page is already short on depth and contrast, you really don't want elements blending together on top of it. I'd also extend that stripe completely to the edges. The navigation tabs are sort of tall and skinny, usually short and wide looks nicer in a modern design like yours (and in general, really). Other than that I like what you did with the placement and design of your headings and page title, it shows some creativity.
On Typography:
Try a nice sans-serif font for your body text and your navigation. Tahoma might look nice in there. Courier gives you a little nerd cred but that's the wrong place to be advertising it, and sans-serif is going to look much better alongside your modern, minimalistic design choice and your cursive headings and page titles.
On color:
Your brown background could stand to be a little more saturated, and I'm not sold on the gray in the tabs or the footer stripe. You have a selection of neutral colors (black, brown, white) and you've muted the brown pretty severely, the last thing you want to do is throw another neutral color into the mix - it gives the color scheme an overall blandness. I would take that orange and drop it down a couple shades, then repeat it somewhere in the page such as the subheadings or the navigation tabs for balance. Also, even though you're obviously shooting for minimalism a little texture in the background wouldn't kill. For an example of your color scheme put to really good use check out
Rob Goodlatte's blog. Note the different uses of contrast to set out different page sections. Don't feel like you have to compete with stuff like that right off the bat, just think of it as inspiration.
Finally, on code:
It looks like you haven't really started picking up CSS yet, so I won't nitpick too much, but eventually you're going to want to learn to use external stylesheets and remove all the inline styling instructions. You're obviously using a table-based layout, which is icky, and hopefully you'll move toward proper semantic HTML as you learn CSS! You do have one error though, "height" is not a standard attribute for a table tag. You can replace that with:
to validate properly. Later on you'll want to do that in a proper stylesheet rather than inline.
