In my CSS layout I want to have the menu part have a different color bg then the content part... Does anyone know how to do that?

you could make a class for it. in your stylesheet put something like

.menu
{background-color: #COLOR;}

and then you could put your menu in a div, but make sure you add class="menu", for example

<div class="menu">
MENU
MENU
MENU
</div>