2 part question on background and footer

1. ok, i have an background image for the main background of the site. after the header image, were it gives you links to the MAIN cat. (in the middle), its black. i want to make it so that so it has that background image instead of the black color. how would i do that?

2. the footer bar, where it has the HOME link on it, how would i be able to take all that off, and just have a 1px border in place of it?

For the background, find the wrapper id that encloses the right part of the page, and in your /includes/templates/your_template/stylesheet.css, edit that wrapper's rule to add

background-image: url(../images/your_image.gif);

or whatever the location/name of your image is.

The footer can be turned off by editing /includes/templates/your_template/common/tpl_main_page.php as described in the comments at its top, or you can affect its display by editing the #navSuppWrapper rule in the stylesheet. You can turn off most of the footer elements in admin.