Your banner topic looks fine to me and is the functionality I was referring to, yeah. So if that’s what you were looking for, err, there ya go. 
@simon 's CSS spruces things up quite nicely, too.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to here though, my forum doesn’t have an active banner topic or anything that (should) appear everywhere but the categories page (I think?). Talking about someone else’s forum, maybe?