Any ideas for good site layout?

[Twin-Skies]

Here's the gist:

I'm currently employed as a marketing/research assistant at a start-up company that will be covering news regarding the green energy business - solar energy, wind energy, biofuels, etc.

Aside from pulling together our list of newsletters for info, I've been tasked with coming up with ideas for a good layout for our site, which will be launching this February 2009.

A lot of you guys are way more net-savvy than I am, so I was wondering if you might be able to recommend any sites that you feel have a good layout we can study.

We need something professional-looking ( our clients will be mostly business-type), yet easy to read and use.

Any ideas for widgets and other add-ons (RSS) will be most welcome.

Thanks

[Grim]

Is the site going to be updated frequently? Or is it going to be a bit more static, with links to the contents instead?

If it's the former, I'd suggest a blog-like layout, much like these:

http://www.revolutiontwo.com/demo/elements.html (good for text + images)
http://5thirtyone.com/ (good for plain text)

If it's the latter, these come to mind as good launchpads:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
http://www.opendns.com/