I haven't read through much of this thread but look at your design I had one site with a design I thought was good and clean but had a really bad bounce rate, then I cleaned it up and organized things some more and the new design had an extremely good rate look at the approx stats below.
Design I thought was good had about 80% people leaving before 30 seconds while the cleaner and more organized new design I created I was getting only 18% of people leaving in the first 30 seconds, that's a huge improvement just for design tweaks.
Design I thought was good had about 80% people leaving before 30 seconds while the cleaner and more organized new design I created I was getting only 18% of people leaving in the first 30 seconds, that's a huge improvement just for design tweaks.