unfortunately the most important bits are missing:

1. increasing loading speed of the website

2. increasing speed of MySQL queries (install DBTuna and look at the aggregated top queries)

3. use more caching

4. clean up the directory: reduce the number of directories and possible places for CSS and JS files

5. remove PHP code from HTML templates

6. split HTML into more modular files for more flexible layout changes without having to touch the source code.

Every Dolphin website see more looks the same, due to the limitations you have. You can not change the look completely without changing the code so much that you will end up having problems with updates and future releases or other plugins/modules