Hello,

There is this site that I want to emulate the layout for the frontpage only however I want to probably add a widget for the blog to the right and possibly one on the bottom to even the page out.

Here is the site:

http://starkparks.com/

In a word, experiment. Play with the theme options so you understand what they do. Learn some HTML and CSS so you can look at the source of their page and figure out what they did. Spend time learning wordpress and looking at plugins so you can pick your widgets to do things.

If you do all this, I'm sure you will be able to emulate most any site.