You can use a color wheel to come up with color schemes, and I'd try using ems instead of pxs to handle whitespace. Whitespace is negative space, used for contrast to draw attention to positive space, which could be your copy, let's say. Use a grid to make sure you keep everything aligned and to help you figure out where to put stuff in.
I really like Futura or Baskerville for headers, and I think you should pick a bright, contrasting color against the body copy.
Gradients and Box shadows do look really cheesy with just CSS. The trick is that you should always add a little noise, somewhere between 1 or 2 percent, to your gradients or shadows so you can make them look more textured instead of just flat colors. There's a filter called "Film Grain" which I think is much better than "noise", but it's usually an external plugin. You're gonna have to hit photoshop for that, because I don't know if there is a noise/grain css effect.
I really like Futura or Baskerville for headers, and I think you should pick a bright, contrasting color against the body copy.
Gradients and Box shadows do look really cheesy with just CSS. The trick is that you should always add a little noise, somewhere between 1 or 2 percent, to your gradients or shadows so you can make them look more textured instead of just flat colors. There's a filter called "Film Grain" which I think is much better than "noise", but it's usually an external plugin. You're gonna have to hit photoshop for that, because I don't know if there is a noise/grain css effect.