Hello Mike
You don't need CSS knowledge for some of your answers.
1 - You need to modify the CSS file background-color: #eeeeee; - change that to background-color: #ffffff; that will make the background white. It's not the banner width, it's the padding in the table cell to keep things off the side of the panes. I think that changing the colour should help.
2. You have to go into the skin file and modify it - There are two ways to do this - You can open the ascx file in notepad and remove the following elements in the skin - They are right down the bottom of the page and easy to find.<dnn:COPYRIGHT runat="server" id="dnnCOPYRIGHT" /> <dnn:TERMS runat="server" id="dnnTERMS" /> <dnn:PRIVACY runat="server" id="dnnPRIVACY" />
3. You will need to learn more about CSS to do that - but in the interim what you can do is create a 16 x 16 icon - or larger if you want - and then in the pages settings, scroll downand click the Advanced box - and you'll see *Icons* and a dropdown box - If you select that and choose a picture - an icon will appear next to the page menu - Is that what you mean by graphics? If you want more complicated graphics you'll need to explore some of the CSS and documentation. I have a couple of free skins that have css elements with more colour in the menu.
You need to modify the skin.css file that resides in your skins folder to make changes to reflect that particular skin. I have also a video that gives you an overview on these things and where to find some of the files. But you can open Visual Studio and make the changes to the files - however, they are fairly minor - so even notepad will do.
If you use the ascx file and ftp - it will be reflected immediately. If you use the html method - you will need to zip and upload the skin so the skinning engine can reparse the skin and show the changes. You can also zip and upload the ascx file too.
I hope this clarifies some of your questions and the month end is a good one with your new site finished!
Nina Meiers