Hostmarks theme problem

Hi, I’m loving this theme but cant get the main page to do something. If you use the theme as suggested you create a page and give it the alt_blog_template

The page name is used for the first line and the content for the second. This is displayed here http://hostmarks.com/

The page title would be Welcome to Hostmarks!

Content would be: We make clean and simple WordPress themes for bloggers, and this very page is an example of our first public theme release. Check out the demo or download it right away from WordPress.org.

This works fine on my site but the blue area this sits in is too big and I wanted to make it narrower, also the widgets I have told to show do not show on this front page but do on every other page, instead of my widgets the ones that do show are: Categories, Latest Posts and Archives.

Can anyone help please?