Looking to make a few changes.

I love this theme it’s the perfect style for what I’m going for, there are a couple of things I would really like to change to try and make it a little more mine.

I would like to

-Remove the nav menu (because pages automatically populate to it. I don’t like it)I have messed with the css to shrink the menu size to hide it. -However the link still pops up, still visible on reloads.
-Make the front page boxes icons clickable links
-Remove the text at the bottom left that says “the side bar is not active”.

Any help with these would be great.