If anyone wants a neat little program for making Banner/Menu background images (or others), you can get it at Interkodex. It is called Button Studio and has lots of options like putting text on images or not, shapes, sizing, borders, colors, gradients and more. I've used it for years. It takes a bit of practice getting used to mixing the options but it is a quick way to make buttons and banners. One thing to remember is to set your background color to match your gallery background if you use anything other then a rectangle shape.
They want $20.00 to register it but I never did. In fact, if you go through the Help button to register it, you get a dead link anyway. The only annoying part about it is you get a splash screen asking you to register each time you open the program.
Example Gallery
The above gallery is an example of using the Hexagon shape for the Banner and Menu/Footer Background images. Nothing fancy but the basics without text so you can see what it does. The last image in the album has the shapes you can create. I've used it to create an image and then enhance it further with PSP quite often.
Cowboy
If it ain't broke... fix it until it is!
My Galleries: http://ohiowebs.net/cowboy/
"We're all spending too much time and energy trying to be politically correct about everything." - Clint Eastwood