Help me with my new website!

[KevinM1]

Look at Ars Technica.

I've looked into the Ars Technica website. Well, yes, it look pretty good. It's a bit illogical to fix a div with a white title and no background on the top of the browser window when the background is mostly brighter and makes the title unreadable when you scroll, but it doesn't make the content difficult to read.
I've never actually thought that the light-green color can be used to drive attention to a part of a text.

You'll note that I didn't say copy Ars, but rather to look at it.  It does a lot of things right, specifically for readability.  Doesn't mean it's perfect.

A website's design is its UI.  And if you're interested in making software - whether it's desktop apps, mobile apps, games, websites, whatever - the UI matters.  And the things that are wrong/bad with your site's design aren't website-specific.  You can't just wave this away because it's a site, and you're not interested in making more sites in the future.  If this was an example you used in a school presentation, or work presentation (think: Powerpoint), or as part of a portfolio you were showing to a potential employer - for any line of work - you'd be laughed out of the building.

Look, I come from the world of competitive programming. I learned programming to basically be able to make a program that works as quickly as possible, and the efficiency isn't valued much and the design isn't valued at all. Obviously, the skills I learned there are counter-productive in real-world programming.

Yup.  While being able to solve problems quickly is nice, those kinds of competitions are typically pointless dick waving competitions that have no benefit to real world programming.  Readability isn't just an important consideration with UI, but with code itself.  Good code is self-documenting.  Unless you're writing code for a rocket going into space, no one cares if you can shave off a few ms here or there from its execution time.  What they will care about is whether or not your code can be read and understood easily, so other people (people on your team, strangers you're asking on Stack Overflow) can actually follow along and do what they need to do.

PS: your webhost sucks, too.  I tried accessing your Pacman game, and it tells me your website is 'asleep'.

A similar thing appears to happen with your website. Sometimes the webpages load very fast. But every now and then it takes some 20 seconds to load a page or it doesn't load at all (the browser says that the connection to the server can't be established or that the connection timed out). Is it possible that your server-side scripts run into an infinite loop sometimes?

I don't know.  This isn't my site.  I'm not a member of staff here.  A purple name merely means someone who has donated some money to address site maintenance costs.  If you've noticed something that isn't quite right from a technical standpoint, talk to someone with a red name.