newbie help with home page

That is usually the responsibility of your theme, so contact the theme author for support. (Theme support is out of scope here.) You may be able to do some CSS tweaking with ‘additional CSS’ in the theme. Use the browser’s Inspector (F9) to dig into that area to find the problem.

How to display both home.php and index.php

I don’t think you fully understand the meaning of templates in WordPress. You do not choose template by including it in URL, WordPress deals with choosing template by making sense of URL request. See Template Hierarchy in Codex.

Have image slider display only on home page

Try this <?php /** * The Header for our theme. * * Displays all of the <head> section and everything up till <div id=”content”> * * @package GovPress */ ?><!DOCTYPE html> <html <?php language_attributes(); ?>> <head> <meta charset=”<?php bloginfo( ‘charset’ ); ?>”> <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″> <title><?php wp_title( ‘|’, true, ‘right’ ); ?></title> <link rel=”profile” … Read more

Set home page to last page of a certain category

you can use the per_get_posts filter hook to change the order of the query something like: add_filter(‘pre_get_posts’, ‘filter_homepage_posts_order’); function filter_homepage_posts_order($query) { //only run is current page is home page if ($query->is_home) { $limit_number_of_posts = 5; //number of posts $featured_category_id = get_cat_id(‘Reviews’); // by cat name… $query->set(‘cat’, $featured_category_id); $query->set(‘posts_per_page’, $limit_number_of_posts); $query->set(‘order’,’DESC’) } return $query; }