How can I make a banner? witch programs do you recommend ?

I know this great article that explains step by step how to make a Fanpop banner. Click link to read it. The programs I recommend are Photoshop, Gimp and PhotoScape. These are the ones I use a lot, but I don't think Photoshop is free, so in case you want to just download the program, I recommend PhotoScape and Gimp, they're really good and Gimp is very much like Photoshop anyway.
link is the link to Gimp, and link is the link to PhotoScape. They're not that hard to use, and you can even make cool effects with them. There must be a lot of tutorials to these programs online, just in case you don't know how to use them. I also have used Paint.net and it's good too, I just haven't used it in a while and the program out of these that is much more simple is PhotoScape, so I think maybe you should try that one first. I hope this helped. :)

go on google and type in how to make a banner and it will give you websites and try one of those. hope you find it thats what i did when i had to make a banner for a school project.