Yes, but your layout is pretty simple. It would be easiest for you to find a simple theme you like, with a left sidebar, and use that for your entire site. You can keep the static homepage and create a blog page. See the following video for how to do this.
http://educhalk.org/blog/?p=243
would i be able to bring just the background into a theme? such as the no-frills theme (obviously i would need to change the colour of the text, but should be ok)
if so how would i do it? i am using a repeat image across for the top and then just colour for the background
How you do it depends on the theme you use, but basically you would change css values for the background colors and yes, you could do a repeating image for the header — or maybe a single image if it’s a fixed width theme.
