The distraction is somewhat deliberate, to draw your eye to advertising. I am not sure I like it there though, its a simple fix.Hi Dan,
I like the 2017 Theme its clean and in line with current web design standards.
Can I just make one comment. That side bar on the left is distracting from a readability point of view. (sorry this is my line of work talking here). Feel free to ignore my comment. 🙂
The side bar is actually distracting as our natural reading behaviour is left to right, and as a result your eyes default to the top left of screen. So each time I keep focusing on the sidebar.
Normally a sidebar at the left is OK, but because the main div is roughly 1250px and centred, the sidebar is in view of your normal reading position at the centre of screen.
Commonly today sites with sidebars run the full 1920, and sites with centred divs (or main/section) only run a top menu bar (or right sidebar).
I want to reskin the whole site but at this stage I need to wait as our backend software is going through a change to a new version so I dont want to do too much work until that happens sometime toward the end of the year and I can start my porting over to the new version.
Are you a front-end developer? Happy to hear your other thoughts