styling a view

Hi , I love this theme to bits and am new to drupal. I have created a block using views and it is in the content top region , I have been trying to style it , like change the background colour , but I haven't been able to get it to work. I named a css class for the view and used it in the css file all to no avail. How can I style this view that is appearing on the frontpage. It is in a table format.

Help will be very much appreciated for a newbie. Thanks