How do you present articles?

I've got a section of one of my sites that has some articles.

After it being up for a few months and watching my log/traffic, I took a more critical look at the page.

Despite the articles all being written by me and probably because there are only a few of them, the page looks like one of the spammy MFA sites.

I've played with moving things around, but since it is such a small sub-section of a bigger site, I can't figure out how to fix/design it while keeping some continuity with the rest of the site.

I would love some suggestions as my logs indicate that section of the site gets visitors, but few stay.

The page is here: Crafty Website.

Most of the MFA site are designed very simple (less graphics, desgin). Since your design is very basic the page is getting an image of an MFA site.
I think one thing you can do is to add a comment section, some digg, delicio buttons or a voting system.

I will take Olaf's idea and add something more.

What you need is a blog web site for your articles.

This will help you both with the MFA thing, and it will increase the user loyalty to your site :)

:)

I am working on a seperate, but related blog. I'm still setting it up. It will be on it's own domain. I had planned to keep the original articles in place. Now I'm wondering if I should move them?

I have a similar problem, I wrote some articles (including some PHP code) and need to include them in my blog site but highlighting php code is not so fine with wordpress. Will say I need to show them at my homepage :(

I don't know if it would do what you need, but I'm using Serendipity. It's open source, has a very active forum (didn't find any unanswered posts), and there is constantly new templates and plug-ins being added.

Part of why I chose it is how fast it loads.

With the built in templates and easy installation, you could literally have a blog up and running in under 10 minutes.

I guess I'll need to rethink having the articles on the directory.

is this a blog software?
Serendipity

Yes, it is. I've only begun playing with it, but it seems like it is more flexible than WP - at least what some of the more active programmer types are saying. It seems so folks are also using it as a CMS and running traditional looking sites with it.

Most blogs seem to load so slowly on my dial-up connection and the ones that use this software loaded more like a regular HTML page.

When people develop templates, they are tested for standards compliance. They even ask that any plug-ins or templates be written to their standards with inline comments and tabbing.

So far I've been very impressed with both the software and the community.