Struggling With My Homepage Design

I spent 8 days struggling with my home page design, honesly I have no design backgroud, and have no painting background.

So am I confident to produce such a crafted work?

Initial experiment

After doing theoretical research from library, I feel I literally need to apply what I have learnt to practice.

If I just imagine in my mind, and never playing around of Photoshop, ImageReady, I will never see my work.

Initially, I want to use dark-red colour as my site background, a colour that frequently appears in the old painting from 17th or 18th century.

I want to delivery a kind of serious feeling since the site is about classical piano music.

Then I tried the colour I want, but I feel it's so dull, and lack of living smell, and I just feel it's so heavy.

As well, the pictures I put there for giving kind of idea looks so unprofessional, the whole page seems childish, and I just hate it.

More experiments

Later on, I feel my home page should be more lighter and more elegant, simplicity is the key, then I decide just using black and white as the main colour.

Surprisingly, it works very well the background colour as black and white, I know the fonts might cause problems, because as david said such as Verdana, is good for online writing.

But obviously these normal fonts won't work in my site, as the main theme is classical piano music.

Ultimately I decide to use more artistic fonts.