For starters clean up your HTML its a mess, dont do inline comments. Link out your CSS like so....
Stick this above your header
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
This goes in the header.
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="index.css" />
now as to change your font color to red in your css add this...
color: #ffffff
You can either put that in a DIV tag or a class tag of your choice.
As to your first row, what do you mean by,
and the first row to background color of red
?