vit1 - 1:42 pm on Feb 11, 2010 (gmt 0)

I need your advice. I am creating web applications to experiment with my research in Information Retrieval.
I do not spend much time to web design.
However my sites appearance was criticized many times, like it is boring, etc. and I want to do something easy to make it better. Usually I have header, content and footer parts. No images, pure HTML.
Probably I need to make a nice image for the header. I probably need a simple tool to create images. Any advice?