I'll say It up front, I'm not a designer. So my site isn't the best, but ultimately when it came to deciding how to make it look I just couldn't go and re-use one of the many absolutely horrid free site templates out there. And unfortunately I have issues finding anyone else to help in anything I do.
So I was stuck with designing the site layout myself. Originally the site would probably have ended up being something in a silverish grey, with a gradient at the top and black boxes with rounded corners.
However, one day I thought about making my website resemble my own desktop. Nicely enough my background images Hardy Simple Colors actually came with SVG versions of the background. To create the theme for this site I basically exported individual parts of the layers of the background into .png files and layered them on top of each other using a variety of background offsets and both scrolling and fixed placements of them.
Likewise for the portal page I wanted to use the background from my login screen unfortunately it was only in .png format. I ended up using a similar technique instead on the Fretstak wallpaper and grabbed a number of icons from Wikimedia Commons for use in the portal:
