Isn't THIS Pretty?
The Web is a full-colour medium. Use it. Everyone knows about busy backgrounds -- heck, half the sites out there have backgrounds that threaten to drown out whatever's on the page. You've got to be creative. Try colour co-ordination, for example. Take your favourite bright, busy background and set text and link colours to tastefully co-ordinate. With some fine tuning, you can make the site into a "find the content" game.
Alternately, go for clash: pick your colours to jar as much as possible -- if you do it properly, viewers will leave to avoid headaches. Variant: go for neon effects (specialized skill). With the right colour combinations, you can create a page on which the text literally pulsates -- at first glance, it looks really sharp. Prolonged viewing will make people cross-eyed.
Of course, this set of annoyances is tricky. There are so many monitors out there and they all handle colour differently. To ensure maximum success with these techniques, you'll have to test them on a wide range of monitors.