I would never describe myself as a web designer, most of what I do uses a very simple box technique and everything looks very square and boring.

I’ve recently been experimenting with gradiant backgrounds and have found 2 sites very useful for this,  Yuichi Tateno Background Image Maker and DynamicDrive Gradient Image Maker

I have also been using a brilliant site for Creating rounded corners in CSS Obviously, they won’t turn my sites overnight to works of beauty, but at least I can now tone things better rather than just using contrast.