change the background color

Well, the easiest way would be to add a wrapper div to the node and then style that wrapper in CSS. E.g., say the body of your node looks like this:

<p>This is the body of my node</p>
<p>I like the following animals:</p>
<ul>
<li>turtles</li>
<li>snakes</li>
<li>eels</li>
<li>bunny rabbits</li>
</ul>

Change it to this:

<div class="super_special_bgcolor_style">
<p>This is the body of my node</p>
<p>I like the following animals:</p>
<ul>
<li>turtles</li>
<li>snakes</li>
<li>eels</li>
<li>bunny rabbits</li>
</ul>
</div>

and add the following CSS to a stylesheet for your theme to make the node have a red background:

DIV.super_special_bgcolor_style {
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
border: none;
background-color: red;
}

That's not the best way to do it if you want to do it more than once, but it gets the job done.

=======================
Just another newbie.
XHTML Strict: it's the way to be.
=======================
Feature request: HTML Source Formatting in TinyMCE

errr, maybe not :) after trying the module i realised it does not have css functions but does other rather clever thing that overrides PHPTemplate variables.

would be nice if also overwrite CSS the styles though