I was a web design student 2 years back, and I showed my design to my old prof, who's been a Contemporary design professor for about 20 years, and he loved it, saying it that it suited my style.
As for the popular font, I don't think Arial Black is all that popular

Especially on the web, where Verdana is king.
I wanted to use something that reflected and used my art for the background, and I also wanted something recent, so I chose the last wallpaper that I did (Which got some high praise from some abstract wallers on dA.
I would put the W3C buttons on the bottom row, but that would only add to the scroll bar for 1024x768 screen res users, which I tried to minimize, even though I primarly designed the page for 1280x1024 res users.