Oregon30: some good advice on here, but I'll take a slightly different tack. I got into steelhead my first year of trying, all on my own - no guides, no fishing with someone who knows what they're doing, no going to crowded holes. What I had to work with was some information from websites like OFF (most importantly, about river conditions and what river the fish are in at a given time), a map, and many years of experience reading rivers for trout fishing.
So, my advice is to pay a little more attention to info about river conditions (don't take this as an insult, but your question about if steelhead are mostly caught near the bank makes me think you could use a little more research into how to work with river heights) - read about water temp, time of day/lighting, water height, whether a river's rising/falling, how long it's been since the rain, etc..there are some great books out there on steelhead fishing btw. Anyway, yea presentation is important, and no, color isn't always that important, but what is ALWAYS important is what condition a river is in and if there are going to be steelhead there on any given day!
Last thing, I suggest you spend some time this summer river fishing hard for trout, learning where they hold up and other aspects of behavior (and I apologize if you already have this kind of experience). But with trout, their presence is way more reliable than steelhead (I haven't gotten skunked trout fishing on a river in quite a long time) so you can learn more in a shorter amount of time. I'm not into standing arm in arm with a bunch of dudes tossing big pieces of pencil lead, or bobber and whatever, over and over through the same hole mindlessly, so I use my old trout-fishing-inspired approach and work up and down the banks of rivers, trying every likely spot before moving on, and I catch fish, and it's fun.
