Here is a screen shot of my personal portfolio page.
I edited some things to hide some personal info and peoples images.
I also zoomed it out a bit so you can see more of it.
Looks better at orig size.
This is a fairly simple looking design but I think it's kind of cool as well.
The fading background is one piece. There are other transparent backgrounds nested in front of it. The dashed line pattern, the colored glows and the dark bar are separate transparent background images. The buttons are separate and jquery. When you hover if fades into an over image but its smooth like flash buttons. I hovered over the first one in the ss.
When you click one, there is a jquery script that glides you down the page to the proper category. There is a looong background that compliments this feature. Each category has jquery based thumbnails with sliding descriptions that click to a lightbox type larger image with site link.
There are other pages with some jquery stuff and a form as well.
I spent a week on this but it was mostly finding jquery stuff I wanted. It was for me, so I took some time and made sure everything was set up how I wanted it. I'm not saying its the best site in the world, far from it but I am happy with it and I wanted to give you an example. If it wasn't for looking for jquery, thinking of what the hell to write, looking over my resume and grammar on the site, I could have knocked more time off of it.
Best of luck