The header stands out much better on the front page, meaning that new people to the site can easily go to that key place and know what it is about.  

As Fran said elsewhere, different monitors and browsers do weird things with the colours and we tried a bunch of combinations.  We can't do wonderful pretty things with scoop.

A lot of time and effort (not on my part) went into trying various versions and discussing what worked best.  The end result may not be appealing to everyone but a little more support wouldn't go amiss in providing suggestions for improvement, as poemless has done.