Customizing Spry Menus

HI,

I just cracked the CS3 Missing Manual last week, so forgive me the newbie question. When I finally get around to creating my first site, I want to have a killer, customized menu navigation bar. I want to creat the buttons in Photoshop. I get that that shouldn't be a problem, but it looks like if I want drop down menus on my nav. bar, I'll need to use Spry. I've been playing around with that a little, and I've gotten a little test button .gif to show up, but it looks like when a menu has a list underneath it, it doesn't work, though the lists themselves are represented by the button. Also, I won't be using the spry text, the buttons will have there own text, and I anticipate problems changing the background images for each navigation button. Am I on the wrong track thinking about using spry for this kind of thing? I know there are sites that sell plug-ins and code that create awesome nav bars, but if I wanted someone else to do it, I wouldn't be trying to learn this stuff! Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

P.S. I know next to nothing about code.