I've recently started using graphics with Paint Shop Pro X in an effort to improve my Web design.

I redesigned my main site with the help of some images and a Frontpage 2003 Dynamic Web Template that I purchased and tweaked (www.farrellkramer.com).  I'm happy with it now and want to upgrade the two Wordpress blogs I have, FKCBlog (www.farrellkramer.com/blog) and my podcast (www.talkingcommunications.com). 

I've customized both blog themes a bit and am generally happy -- except for the header, which is pretty much out of the box.

I tried to create a new one and it came out like this:



The problem is there's this distortion around the image of the microphone and the text where, I assume, the different layers overlap.  Is there some way to get around this?  I see it in other Web sites and it detracts from the quality of the graphics.

Does anyone know how to accomplish this?  I must be doing something wrong.

Lastly, now that the text is part of an image, do I lose the ability of search engines to pick up my podcast name and subhead?  On my blog, it renders the words as text on top of the image.  However, I was hoping to have a cleaner approach.  Any thoughts?  Thanks much.

Thanks much, philvis. 

I upped the file size to as close to 50K as I could get, which really resulted in minimal JPEG compression.  The artwork looks much better.

I went ahead and swapped out the ugly, stock WordPress headers for both my blogs with new ones for my company blog (www.farrellkramer.com/blog) and my podcast (www.talkingcommunications.com).

I feel like it's a big improvement.  Thanks again.