Affiliate Button Blues

I am by no means an artist. I can't draw, and my skills with photo editing based programs on the computer have diminished significantly. I was once fairly crafty with Adobe Photoshop, but now, pfft, its all a foreign language to me.

I need an affiliate button for my site so I can enhance our advertising capabilities and I'm hesitant to go forward without one. It is such a simple graphic, yet so complicated to make it look enticing enough to click on, or care about. My question is...

What is a good software to use for basic image creation? I would like something fairly straightforward and easy, yet you can make something visually appealing such as a 88x31 button -_- .. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

I use gimp and cs2. After looking up tutorials it was easy enough. CS2 is free and all you have to do for font is download styles and it does it for you :3 then you just have your background (make sure its royalty free or plain color) and border. Like this is one of mine.