The city is a good place to start. Change the background to an image of a city. Highlight different parts to represent the different districts. Rearrange the links so they make sense and eliminate some of the useless ones. Just by using Google, I got a couple good ideas:


Overlay the names of the city on the image that ends up being the background. Use the mastery of hover-text to tell players what's in each district. Maybe draw some lines on it to show which district is which or give each one a different color shade. Maybe put the tag for the gang that owns that district on some of the imagery in the hover-text.
Yes, this would make it so you have to actually go into the district to use it, but it wouldn't be that many more steps, and I think this would make people more likely to stay.