Mary Cooch (personal account)

Some first thoughts

• you've just made a small logo - why not make a full sized banner (it would be something like 995/100px (I think) and incorporate your logo bottom left into it? The grey you see is the lack of anything, not a colour of banner. To get to see your logo elswhere you need to make another banner 995x50px (  I think) and upload it instead of logo_small.
• re the image: did you put it in the 'edit summary' section? I did and mine came out ok. I am not sure I can think of another suggestion if you did that already.

Just a thought Ben -have you tried ticking in Front Page settings 'include a topic section' and then putting your photo into there? It should get rid of the white box - look at this:

You have selected formal_white as your theme for the site haven't you? Incidentally, if you use formal_white and replace the banner then you need to make two banners actually - one of 50px height, for when people are logged in and looking at courses/editing. If you log in and check your site when it is online you'll see what I mean.

I have to agree with Steve here. If I am going to create a webpage I normally just go straight to Moodle and do it there - I would advise you to encourage your teachers to do likewise. On the occasions where I have made an html page outside of Moodle, in DW for example, when I have editied it within the Moodle file area I have had to do it in notepad- fine for simple stuff but I'm not competent enough in code for anything more advanced. Additionally, my experience is that Moodle doesn't seem to like it when you paste in code to a  Moodle webpage and  then toggle the WYSIWG and html editor- it brings up all manner of horrid things

Another option, though you have to buy it, is the Powerpoint slide show converter http://www.dzsoft.com/powerpoint-to-exe.html This doesn't require the user to have PPt and it does do the animations/transitions; however, it converts to an exe file and while that is probably fine for use at home, you have to be aware that in some institutions (like ours) students are not allowed to open exe files.