Try to make title a bit more eye-catching (bold them for instance), put the menu in 1 line & change the background as was mentioned (I think fading will be fine if you'd like to keep it)

The only problem that I've seen to your site is the red background is so distracting when I am trying to read your article. Changing the color of it into blue or change the theme will be a good idea to make it nice.

My opinion is also this that you should change the background color and make it light or can use some cool background image so that your article content become easy to read.