Changing background colors in the folders

Art,

Do you have this working successfully?

Have you tried hiding the folders using something like:

chflags hidden ~/Documents 

Then creating a link to it such as (in Terminal):

cd ~
mkdir stuff
cd stuff
ln -s ~/Documents

I believe that this will hide the ~/Documents folder from the Finder but it will still be there so anything writing to it will work OK. In addition you will see the link in ~/stuff...

The Finder sidebar is designed to let you customize quite a few personal folders for rapid access.

This video is great to understand the basics:

• Mac OS X: Using the sidebar

There are many guides on the web, but two support articles can get you started as well:

• OS X Lion: What is the Sidebar?
• OS X Lion: Organize the sidebar

Some people also like to use the dock, but folders saved there don't show up in open and save dialogs so you can have your pick of places to keep useful folders at hand based on your needs. One last option is a third party shortcut tool like Alfred, LaunchBar or QuickSilver. They let you use keyboard shortcuts to find files and folders and many more things as well. If you avoid the pointer and like using the keyboard, these three are worth checking out once you've gotten up to speed on the built in solutions.