Border Not Reaching All the Way to the Top

Ok, I know this probably isnt the proper place to say this...but

What are you doing your graphics with? No offense, they are grainy and look terrible. You might want to work on that before you try and sell your services.

I'm using PSP 6, and I turned on antialiasing. As stated in another post, I'm not really trying to sell my services yet, and this is the site I'm using to build up my skills, because I couldn't think of another subject matter that interests me enough. I haven't showed it to any possible customers yet, and I don't plan to in the near future.

remove the html tags from your style sheet ( )

things like margin-top:0px;
margin-left:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
margin-right:0px;

can be done with margin:0;
note 0 does not need a sizing attribute ie. px

you haven't set your body margin to 0 so it wont go to the very top.
The body controls the overall browser window, the classes control each section inside the body.

If I was you, I'd make what your doing in tables first, then once your more comfortable with CSS transfer it across.
Since you are new to CSS I also wouldn't recommend you design for IE, instead choose another browser (opera, mozilla, safari, netscape or something) as you'll have to redo this fix and others to work on the other browsers. If it was just a personal site it wouldn't matter as much but one day you plan to use it as a design site so needs to be browser compatiable, ideally from the start.
Take a look at what you have now in mozilla, you don't have much content but the layout is already breaking down. You're making work for yourself.

Hey your banner looks like that because you are re-sizing it down in the browser. Not the way to go. Make it the size you need it to be in your image editor.

I am developing it in safari, and then checking it in windows IE 6 every so often.

When I remove the tags, it somehow blows up or something, and gives me horizontal (and vertical) scroll bars.

I tried changing the margins and padding in BODY but it didn't do anything.

When you remove the html tags in the .css file it "blows up or something" to your settings. It's the difference of bits of it kind of working and the whole thing working.

Forget about IE, if it's close enough, it will work in IE

Your body class: what did I say before about 0 values not needing an type, where did you get border from?

Do you know the difference between id and class (. and #) ?

Have you tried validating your style sheet?
You'll have to remove the html tags before validating it

if your getting big scroll bars remove all your code and replace one section at a time to find out whats causing it. From looking at your style sheet it could be a number of things.

Check your html too, I see double closing span tags:
home

Busy, I do know the difference, though I probably don't the correct time to always use them. I had thought that I want to not use a . or a #, because it's a tag that's already imbedded into html.

html tags, like body, h1, p etc don't need . or #

a class (.) can be used whenever you want
a id (#) should only be used once

if its not an html word and your in doubt, class it

I had thought that id's were used as sort of cells. Do you have a good refrence page to all of this?

ID: references a specific tag, used to help with scripting especially client-side, should be unique (used only once).
If you wish to get the same effect with other tags, use CLASS

CLASS: references a specific type of tag, used to help with design and appearance.

http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_standardattributes.asp

How many times do you need to be pointed to the references before you read them?

Web Standards has pages of references to get you up to speed.

read this