new banner

I thought it was time for a new banner and since I had so much fun making these fruit and veggie kids, I decided that I would use them in the banner. I had some issues with JPEG compression (urgh!), but it doesn't look too bad, I guess. I don't know why this happens sometimes but not others. It's very annoying and everything I tried to do to fix it didn't work. It seems to happen most when it's a large file that I shrink down and save as a jpeg. I flatten the image first, then resize it and save. Anyone with techy skills got a solution? Please help....