Adding new free fonts to try out.
Successfully added my favorite apple textured background to the page body. Finally managed to cover it with a transparent gradient, but the gradient ends at the bottom of the footer rather than continuing to the bottom of the window. Will continue working to fix this.
Fixed the body's background gradient problem (ended at footer rather than at page bottom before). Turns out, I needed to specify a height of 'auto' and a min-height of '100%' in my html tag, rather than just working with the body tag alone.