modification slider header

Hi,

thank you very much for offering such a great theme. It’s really a pleasure to work with it even for a non-professional such as me. I’ve managed to set up most of my blog the way I want it to be, but there are some questions left.

1. As I use a featured slider on my home page, I would like to make sure that the text can be read easily with any picture. However, I couldn’t find out how to define a background for the letters only and not for the whole field?

2. I want the category pages to have a headline. I have found out that I can define an introduction text in the category set up tab but I have no clue how to add a headline before that. I want it to look like this http://www.shortcuts.life/kinder-kinder/ but at the moment it looks like this http://www.shortcuts.life/category/kinder-kinder/

3. Within my posts I would like to have the date right underneath the headline. At the moment its at the bottom between two lines. I don’t need the lines – I just want the date in exactly this light gray italic font to go to the top.

It would be very kind if you could help me to complete my blog. I work with a child theme and I only have very limited html knowledge.

Thank you very much in advance.
Ellie