Colours and shades

So I'm checking out if/how I can achieve what I want re the background of the LIF2 home page. I wanted to achieve a gradient shading using CSS. I found this handy site re how to make transparencies happen cross browser:
http://css-tricks.com/css-transparency-settings-for-all-broswers/
which is great - except it shades out the content as well as the background. When i apply it to the div. Maybe I could just apply it as a class to the background image? Not thinking clearly, rather tired...

Anyway, another alternative is to have a repeating shade image, which is what I've figured most sites seem to do. If I'm interpreting things correctly...

In the mean time I'm looking at shades of colours, so I can just use a gradient of the key colours on the site (so I don't have too busy a palette). A couple of handy sites:
http://www.december.com/html/spec/colorshades.html A list of colours and for each, 3 shades lighter in hex
http://slayeroffice.com/tools/color_palette/ Awesome tool, creates 10 shades of a base colour, with degrees of opacity

Now, back to fun and games with vertical alignment...