For someone new to web design your doing a great job! - when starting off try to keep things simple, simple layouts using colors that go well together and lots of white space, which you have done. For both sites you need to learn to use semantic markup. It's not difficult and will make a better designer out of you overnight! I wrote a short article on semantic markup you may be interested in, and also I couldnt reccomend this book highly enough.

Keep coding your getting there!

p.s you can do me the favour in return and tell me what you think og my site click here.