For people like me who are not used to design a website from scratch, to design a website is a big deal (even if it's just a backend).

To help you out to solve this problem (at least the color scheme one), I found this useful website http://colorschemedesigner.com/ which gives you a color set to use in your website, starting from a single hexadecimal colour. Actually I have redisigned my blog using it!

Just selecting to obtain the scheme:

 

colorscheme-picker

 

And then you can see some examples of how a website would look like.

 

colorscheme-lightpage

 

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