Realizing that, eventually, I would want my site to have some sort of graphic, I designed a nice banner that I could put at the top of my site. I knew the basics of photoshop- and the tools I used were not that complex. I simply used a large paintbrush with faded edged to make the entire graphic have a color effect with a bit of gradient. I then used the text tool, found two nice fonts, and used those to finish the top.
The entire thing took about ten minutes, and as a result, I have produced this:
I chose the color scheme I did simply because it is the same as our school colors. If I need to change it later, I can. Photoshop is nice in that it allows you to edit layers.
