Believe me, there is nothing wrong with a plain white background. A good rule of thumb is to test your page on both Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer to see how your design looks on each browser. One important consideration as you build your site is copyright. Just because most of the legislation concerning intellectual property was enacted prior to the development of the Internet does not mean it is not relevant to it. You simply can not swipe text and graphics from someone's site and add it to your's without some legal repercussions.
Excerpts are fine but anything beyond that requires permission from the source.
Once you get your site up and going, you'll want to publicize it. You can post your site on relevant newsgroups as well as contacting a number of submission services and search engines.