Are you talking about the site navigation and the banner at the top of the page? You can either use tables or use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Most professional websites use CSS to position elements. Just do a Google search on CSS and see what comes up. Pokébeach uses CSS; just look at the source code of the main page to get an idea of what it looks like. Don't copy the layout, though.
If you are only a beginner in HTML, start out with tables for arranging the layout of the site. If you want a background for a table cell, just do this:
<td background="URL or location of the picture">
Hope this answers your question.