With a Basic Repeater web part, you typically hook it up to some sort of data source web part (sql, custom query, etc). Once you define the data source, you attach it to the Basic Repeater web part and define your transformations (items). In your Basic Repeater properties you can specify HTML content before and after so you can wrap your results in a <div> or <ul> or whatever you need.

You might start out by looking at the Corporate site example to see how some of the web parts are setup. You could also look at the documentation to get some examples