How do you make a thin DIV in bedford that can have its own blocks in it, and have a different background color?

It seems simple enough. The Design that I am trying to implement for the website that I am making consists of thin color strips that have buttons, images and text inside them. When I make an index page Using a banner does not work because you cannot put blocks in them. When I try using custom CSS to make a div on the page a certain color It still is too big. On my index page I implemented this code:

div#homepage1{
  height: 55em;
  background: #E30A1F !important;
}

 To fix the size problem I tried adjusting the height to be smaller. However that also presents problems. When the screen resolution gets smaller that 900px all of the blocks stretch outside of the color. Also I cannot move the blocks higher so they are off vertical center. As seen in this first screenshot. As you can see, one screenshot looks much cleaner and more professional than the other.

The second screenshot is what I am trying to accomplish. If anyone has a simple way to accomplish this, I'm all ears, heck even a complicated solution, just as long as it gives me this specific design. Thanks for reading!