You color the background by adding the attribute BGCOLOR="..." (for instance) into the <BODY> tag. You color text by enclosing it in <FONT COLOR="blue"> and </FONT> (for instance). Your browser knows many colors, like red, green, blue, yellow, pink, purple, lime, navy, fuchsia, olive, grey, silver, brown, aqua, teal, black, and white. More colors can be addressed by a six digit code like in COLOR="#66CCCC" or COLOR="#660033"
Here or here you can get the codes of the colors.