I think I understand what banding is now but I don't see how it looks bad, or how to make it look better.  I made a basic attempt to fix the "K," but as you can see it doesn't look any better.

Firstly, thanks for more continuing to take time to explain this to me.

Now, if I were going to fix the banding, let's say the banding in the letters (though there is banding elsewhere as well, I'm sure), would I add more intermediate colors in there to smooth it out? Or would I dot each shade into the next like I did the crown face? Or add intermediate colors into the "corners"? Or what?

yes there is a big banding problem  in your letters there. it is when there are two (or more) one pixel thick lines of color that are the same length and that line up with each other. here

http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/7136/poop.png

do i have it right cure?

I looked up that banding link you posted and I couldn't make heads or tails of it.  The examples of banding given looked totally fine to me and I couldn't understand what they even meant by their definition of "banding."

I guess pixel art is beyond me.  Thanks for the advice though.

it's not detail, it's texture. detail comes from the careful application of individual pixels.

Control?  What is supposed to be controlled?  I'm not understanding.

I did this by hand.

I don't know what about it looks to be done automatically.

There is tons of artwork on this site that is even WAY more detailed than this.

well pixel art is about control, so it's not a good indicator if it looks like an automatic tool placed the pixels.

also banding is a problem in several spots.

And also, it was made in Paint, all except the transparent background.

How do you mean, "random, scratchy pixel placement"?  Like, the face of the crown's metal being randomly speckled?  That was my attempt at belnding the shades together.  First I made rays of increasing/decreasing brightness up and down the crown's face, then I speckled each color into the next color by hand.  I thought that's how it was supposed to be done.

random, scratchy pixel placement leads me to believe there was some npa (non pixel art) tool usage here, wer require that everything be pixelled 100% by hand.