Choose a color theme and stick with it. Changing colors and backgrounds every page is confusing and is the mark of an amateur. Keep the same colors for text and links, especially links. If your links are not underlined, it is often hard to differentiate between links and plain text. Use animation sparingly.
Nothing is more distracting than trying to read text that is flying around the page.
Using stylesheets is about as fancy as I get. It does not effect the basic layout of the page though. Do not use one of those fancy HTML generators. You will discover that you can control the layout and appearance of your site much easier with a plain text editor or word processor. Plus you will have the added benefit of learning how to use the different HTML tags.