Newbie styling

[doli]

Hi all,
I added post in resources forum, but decided to give a try and style my first forum by myself.
I'm total styling noob, but want to learn a little bit, as I will have one or more forums to style as well.
Hopefully this thread will work as some kind of tutorial for newbies.

Here's my homepage layout:

Here is my test site: http://dev.pececik.com/forum (login/pass = test/test)
I changed all easy things (not a lot, logo + footer background + sidebar fonts).

1. Header:

First, and probably general question I have gradient all around header, and I'm not sure how does it work. I checked Xenforo css and it's done by line like this:

background: #65a5d1 url('styles/default/xenforo/gradients/navigation-tab.png') repeat-x top;

We have gray rectangle image and it's somehow combined with background color, where can I find how it's calculated? As I would like to get exactly the same dark blue gradient as on the picture above.
2. How can I add banner to the header?
3. How can I change text color ? I tried changing Navigation Tab text color in Style Properties to white but it doesn't work, ther are still light blue.

 

[Matthew2D]

For a newbie, the style looks really good! I can't say I'm a expert as I am a newbie myself, but good job! The colors look great.

 

[doli]

Well the grahpic wasn't done by newbie ;P newbie is going to code it

 

[Matthew2D]

Well the grahpic wasn't done by newbie ;P newbie is going to code it

How did you get the bottom footer that XenForo has?

 

[doli]

It's only psd file, I just want to code it into xenforo style

 

[Matthew2D]

Could you give me the code?

 

[doli]

It's not ready yet, that's why I started this thread. To find answers which could help me code this graphic into xf style. Now my test forum looks like this (http://dev.pececik.com/forum - user/pass: test/test) so long way before it's going to look like design.