WP Upgrade Broke Old Web Site – Need to integrate static index pg into new theme

I recently did a security upgrade of a WP web site that I did not originally design. The original version was heavily customized, and the upgrade made tags and categories disappear, and various plug-ins stopped working. Therefore, I decided to rebuild the site around a modern theme.

Everything is going well except for the front page of the web site. The original web site had a static front page that was on the top level of domain, while the WP part of the site was in a folder called weblog. If anyone types the URL without “weblog” on the end, they get this static front page. When I tried to set the current theme of WP to use the url without “weblog” on the end, the whole thing broke again.

It seems like the easiest thing to do is just retain the old static front page. This page still imports the header and left-hand sidebar of the new theme, but it throws the third column down to the bottom of the page.

This might just be a case of me not knowing how many </div> tags should be there at the end. Again it’s really confusing for me since I didn’t not make this static index page in the first place. I noticed there was a lot of </div> without <div>s, and I’ve always just assumed they are somehow matched in the php call for the WP header at the top of the page.

I would like to fix this as quickly as possible so I can get on to the job I’m actually supposed to be doing right now. I would really appreciate it if someone could just give me a snippet of code and tell me where to put it.

This is the URL for the static page: http://www.breakingranks.net

Thank you in advance for your help.