[thelist] CSS design help

[John DeStefano]

My wife has asked me to put together a site to help her showcase and
sell homemade chocolates. She'd like it to have modern functionality
with a country/homey/Americana feel.  I've put simple sites together
before, but not anything like this.  She's not putting any pressure on
me, but I wouldn't want it to suck, and in order for it to serve its
purpose, I would need to put it together fairly quickly.

I would like to do this layout with CSS, but my use (and
understanding) of CSS to this point is quite minimal and limited
mostly to text formatting.  As such, I am resigned to doing the inital
design with tables, and later, when I have a better understanding,
going back and recreating the design with CSS.  I realize this means a
lot of rework for not a lot of payoff, other than my hope of gaining a
cleaner layout and, I hope, something of a working knowledge of CSS
design.

At this point, I have simple ideas about general layout (content
centered, simple banner on top, simple nav menu beneath that, all
bordered by a nostalgic, Americana-style ribbon graphic), color theme
(maroon, deep blue, and cream white), and navigation (generic top
menu, with 'product' categories and products in more detail on drill
down).

I've seen and saved some great links to CSS sites and tutorials from
this list.  I've run through a few of them, and I think I'll have a
better understanding with more practice.

I guess I'm feeling way out of my league and looking for a few ideas
to help me get started, pointers to resources (where would one find
graphics in such a style, or how would you go about creating them, or
converting hand-drawn images to Web-usable graphics?), and any advice
on how this can be done with CSS and learning these design techniques.

I realize these requests range everywhere from completely obscure to
bordering on professionally intrusive, but I would appreciate any help
I can get from the community of designers on this list.

Thank you,
~John