Three Boxes on Homepage

[polyfragmented]

I personally would do it with floats. Another way to do it is using display: inline or inline-block. Both have their caveats or things to keep in mind while using them, so not sure what the "best" way would be. I'm comfortable with floats.

Basic info on styling background can be found here. For more diverse sources, just do a search via Google and others.

As far as I understand it, the CSS3 multi-column layout module affects text, not arbitrary elements.