So I'm adding an about page on my blog. On the about page I want to list my skill set. It's currently an unordered list. I'd like to display it with a nice graph (an image), Would it be a good idea to replace the whole UL with a background image? Maybe there's a better way to accomplish this?
If you want the search engines to know about your skill set then I'd leave it as a list, if not, then the image will be fine. You can always find a way to do both.
Have you considered building the graph using markup and CSS3? I would seriously consider displaying both -- or maybe using Canvas to pull the data from the markup for display... but really, the text content is the important part.
I also like to keep it as text list. If you like then try to format your list. Mix font sizes and styles.