pardon my construction mess

I have been playing with the design of the blog today. It is still very much a work in progress but I want it to be welcoming and a reflection of me. So excuse the mess while I continue to try to get what I want here. Anybody know how to make the title better? I think if I could figure out how to add text to the jpg file that is the header, things would be so much better! Any ideas how to do that? I have elements 5.0 and can not seem to make it work with these files.