Exercises

If you have an archive of company (or personal) photos, look through it to find a few that might enhance your web site. Scan them (or send them out to be scanned) so that you'll have a library of graphics all ready to draw from as you produce more pages in the future. If you have photos taken on a digital camera, you can obviously skip the scanning step and jump straight into prepping the images for your web pages.
Before you start designing graphics for an important business site, try spicing up your own personal home page. This will give you a chance to learn Paint Shop Pro (or your other graphics software) so that you'll look like you know what you're doing when you tackle the task at work.