improving my templates

[cosmic]

Hi guys

I’ve been using Joomla for about 5 months and I’m now starting to do sites for friends. Being disabled and unable to use a keyboard I dictate using a voice recognition package which would make coding a template incredibly slow.

So far I’ve created 3 sites using on dreamweaver. I use tables to create my templates and use a combination of graphics packages to make it look pretty. The site I’m currently working on is a sister site to DAWGdogs which will hold different information from this site. This one is done by another friend but not on Joomla and I’d like to replicate the general style of the pages.

My current site efforts are:
Access Travellers Trophy - Welcome to the Access Travellers Trophy
www.excaliburchallenge.co.uk
Dorset Animal Workers Group - Home which is still under construction

I feel my pages are to blocky compared to the dawgdogs.net and would like to improve my ability. I’m reasonably good at creating custom graphics so just need to know how to lay them out. Having said this I would really like to know how to Create curved corners on Adobe illustrator or photo shop!

If anyone can offer advice it would be gratefully accepted!

Many thanks
Keith