Fish Recommendations For A Complete Newbie?

Hi and welcome 

With hard alkaline water you need to look at fish like livebearers which do come in bright colours. Fish like endlers, guppies and platies would all be fine in that tank; swordtails might be a bit big.
There are a few shoaling fish that are fine in hard water eg lemon tetras, x ray tetras, fortail blue eyes (also called forktail rainbowfish).

It is fish like neon tetras (the blue and red ones) that would be a problem; in order to keep those you need soft acid water. You would need to use RO water, either all RO with some remineralisation salts added, or a mix of RO and your hard tap water. RO stands for reverse osmosis and is water that has had all the minerals removed. Even soft water fish do need some minerals which is why you'd have to add some with 100% RO. This is what the man at the shop was talking about. You can buy you own machine but it is very wasteful of water if you are on a meter.
I will be honest and tell you to get some experience with fishkeeping before going down this route.

There is a Community Creator on this site which will help with fish numbers. Click on 'fish profiles' at the top of the page, click on any fish and scroll down to the bottom of the page.

I have the Eheim aquastar tank. The company sell it as a 54 litre tank, but that is the volume of the entire tank. You have to leave a gap on top of the water or it would overflow. You may well find that your aquabay is the same. My tank is in my signature as 50 litres but by the time I put in a substrate and some decor it actually took 45 litres to fill it. Just to warn you not to stock it as though it holds 104 litres of water!



Have you read up on fishless cycling yet? It sounds complicated but is much safer for the future fish and much easier for the fishkeeper.

Some people say that you should leave the plants out until the cycle is finished as the plants may "interfere" with the results of your tests  since they will use up some of the ammonia, nitrites and nitrates. Personally I think this is (as is a lot of advice about fishkeeping) "much ado about nothing". If you put the plants in first, they will be established by the time you get your fish. Plants are very beneficial and having them growing away early is valuable. It is much easier to plant them, before you fill the tank. Put in the substrate and an inch or two of water, then the plants. Fill up the tank carefully, trying not to uproot the plants. If you leave the planting till later, you will find it much harder to get the plants in, you have to put your arm into the water, it's more difficult to see where you are putting them and they tend to float away.

I'd advise buying cheap easy plants, the expensive ones that come in pots are often difficult to grow. Things like Vallisneria, Sagittaria and Hygrophila are easy, as is Java Fern tied to bogwood.