It's a little JQuery plugin called Parallax. This is the site that I made for my mom's campground. It has the forum on it. Nothing fancy but she likes it.
http://selkirklake.net

Melissa, VSD is very easy to learn and you could have a nice site up and running in no time with it. It also produces standards compliant code to avoid cross-browser issues.

I recently helped someone replace her organization's Word Press site with a VSD site. The original designer charged $750 for a basic free template with 2 pages . After struggling with it for a few weeks, she realized there was no way to get the site she wanted without paying a whole lot more for some custom coding tweaks and additions.

We got the new VSD site done in a matter of days and now she has a site suited to her organization's needs, rather than a generic WP blog theme.

You can set up a Coffee Cup Stream (blog) for your site and if you needed to add a forum, several members here have recommended Simple Machines:
http://www.simplemachines.org/

Simple Machines is what I use.

Wow thanks paintbrush. Does it require a fancy php host like HostGator, or can I go back to my simple ISP as host?

Does VSD do a separate style.css or does it put the code in each page?

The styles code for each page rides with each page.

I know when the design guy did the site, he put in some spiffy things, like automatic updating of the site maps in the search engines.

It's easy to submit a site map to search engines.

I downloaded and installed the latest VSD and started playing with it, but one thing I don't see how to do, is to make the background vary in width, with the person's display size. Can you only do fixed width with it?

Yes fixed width for pages. It will be fine. Don't worry so much about what you may have heard about website standards. Remember all standards started out as be a deviant.