You do not need fancy graphics to make a clean, easy to navigate website. With the appropriate CSS skills combined with PHP you can create some really nice dynamic websites with a great feel to it. As Joozey said, colour matching is quite an important aspect so watch how you combine them.

In regard to WC3, there are heaps of documents on the internet explaining how to meet the required standards. I did validate your http://darkflame.awardspace.com/ and without going into great detail i can see multiple instances of img tags with omitted attributes and not being self closed.





I would suggest reading through http://www.w3schools.com, for a list of all tags and required formatting / attributes you can find them http://www.w3schools.com/tags/
And also try not to use tables where possible.