Title

OK, it's the layout. What you see here is an example. While the code has no color, I gave the example some just for fun. Copy the code inside the text area and paste it into a text editor, then edit at will.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Your title here</title>

body {
color:#000000;
font-family:verdana, arial, helvetica;
font-size:10pt;
background-color:#FFFFFF;
}

a:link, a:visited {
text-decoration:underline;
color:#000000;
}

a:active, a:hover {
text-decoration:underline;
color:#888888;
}

img {
border:0px;
}

#header {
position:absolute;
top:0px;
left:0px;
text-align:center;
height:150px;
width:100%;
}

#leftmenu {
position:absolute;
top:150px;
left:0px;
width:130px;
padding:5px;
background-color:#FFFFFF;
}

#content {
margin-left:130px;
margin-right:130px;
margin-top:150px;
padding:30px;
}

#rightmenu {
position:absolute;
right:0px;
top:150px;
width:130px;
padding:5px;
background-color:#FFFFFF;
}

</style>

</head>
<body>
<div id="header">
<img src="Your banner" alt="Your site name">
</div>

<div id="leftmenu">
<p>Category<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">link</a><br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">link</a><br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">link</a><br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">link</a></p>
<p>Category<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">link</a><br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">link</a><br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">link</a><br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">link</a></p>
<p>Category<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">link</a><br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">link</a><br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">link</a><br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">link</a></p>
</div>

<div id="content">
<p>Content here</p>

</div>

<div id="rightmenu">
<p>Affiliates<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">Apply</a></p>
<p>Category<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">link</a><br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">link</a><br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">link</a><br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#">link</a></p>
<p>Layout template by:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.dragonflycave.com"><img src="http://www.vilhjalmur.com/butterfree/psbuttonb4.gif" alt="The Cave of Dragonflies"></a></p>
<p>Disclaimer: This site is in no way affiliated with Nintendo. Pokémon is &#169; to Nintendo, GAME FREAK and Creatures Inc.</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>

How to edit this layout, for users with limited HTML knowledge

By default, the layout will have borders and backgrounds on the left and right menus but not on the content, but to tweak that, you can add or remove the border: and background-color: styles on the three main DIVs.
If you want to change a background color into a background image, change the background-color:#FFFFFF; part to background-image:url(filename of background image);.
To remove one of the menus, just take it out in the code and stylesheet and change either the margin-left or margin-right of #content, depending on which menu you removed, to 0px;.
The banner, by default, would be somewhere under 150 pixels in height. If you wish to make it bigger, or if your banner is considerably smaller so you want to make the content start higher up, you can edit the top: and margin-top: of the menus and content. If you want to remove the banner altogether, you can just remove the header DIV from the coding and stylesheet and put the top: and margin-top: to 0px;
To make the menus appear the same on every page, cut them out and put into separate files called, for example, leftmenu.txt and rightmenu.txt. Replace them with  and . Save the pages (not the menus) with the .shtml extension. Make sure that your host supports SSI. Edit leftmenu.txt and rightmenu.txt when you want to edit the menus.
It is better to cut and paste everything between the <style> and </style> tags (not including the tags themselves) into a separate file called something like stylesheet.css and then externally link to it by replacing the <style> tags with <link href="stylesheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">. Then the stylesheet will also be the same on every page and making a new style will be a breeze.
If you're going to link back, please visit the Link to Me section to find the most fitting button for your color scheme.

The rest is self-explanatory for anybody who:

knows hex color codes or has some reference for the colors
has basic understanding of the format of HTML and CSS
knows English
has some common sense.

If you fit those requirements, you'll be fine. If not, you can check out my HTML guide for the first two. If you have problems with the latter two, you shouldn't be trying to use my layout anyway.