Hello,
as I understood it, you've got two different questions.
1. What kind of graphics to use, that are good but yet smooth enough to blend in and count as background. We're talking easy on the eyes, but beautiful. Well, there are tons of advice to give there and I'm probably not the divine guru on the subject. If you want to see, what the gurus do, have a look at the
Css Zen Garden. You might also want to consider searching the forums and how-tos on design guidelines. Earlies today somebody posted a link to this website, a
color scheme generator.
2. I can say more about the second point. You talked about fitting graphics together in tables, so that it works together nicely. This can be tedious work of course, especially, if we're talking backwards compatibility.
If you want to do it with tables (CSS can enhance the results and make it easier for you, but as far as my experience goes, you will have troubles making it look the same in any common browser).
Tables for layout purposes are deprecated, but have their advantages.
Applications like Photoshop and ImageReady help a lot with building these tables. If you don't use a WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, you should consider using one for this, because it's difficult to do abstract.
You should think about, who your users are going to be. If they are likely to be up-to-date kids, then you should definitively go CSS instead of table layout.
Ask back, I'm not going to write an essay, when I'm not sure I got your point…
Ruben
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