Two questions for those who have done this:

1) How do you get softly textured background pages on your webpages? I'm not talking about photos - but rather barely visible lines, scrolls, patterns, etc (like a piece of scrapbook paper) that all of the webtext & pictures sits on top of? I want to create something that has scrolls and swirly things, but I don't know how to create or 'draw' those shapes and then fill in the whole background with them and then fade that enough so it doesn't overtake the page. I hope this is making sense.

2) Has anyone made their own website using Frontpage? If so, can you do just about anything you need to using that software?

first, you need an imag - gif is best. You can have the image repeat horizontally or vertically only or across the whole background. Like background-image: "url (.../.../) wherever your image is located. The background-repeat: x or y or none.

I haven't used frontpage. I recommend that people use CSS since you only have to make changes to your "core" and that applies to all the pages of your site.

Just do a google for website backgrounds, there's heaps of free images - already suitably faded for use as a background. It make take a bit of trawling before you find one you like however. I second what littlemissmuffin said about css.

You can also check Istock for background images you want to use. A lot of "free" images are a bit, umm, can't find the right word. Well, they're either overwhelmingly busy or just not right somehow. Although I have seen a few with lace or embroidered backgrounds that were pretty nice.

I recommend Zencart, Oscart or Joomla Virtuecart. Joomla is really nice to work with though. Zencart is nice once you get the "hang" of it, takes a lot of time to sort out how you want your site to look, especially if you want to get away from the generic ZenCart look.