Oakland theme – columns & images, very frustrating

Hello!

I’m new to WP and my company has selected the Oakland theme for our company website. At the moment, our current website thats up is embarassing. Hence why we’re making a new one, my bosses know I’m savvy with technology and computers so they have me making this new website.

Overall WP has been fairly easy to use, but I’ve been hitting several bumps.

The main page slider only takes the top half of photos and it stretches everything out to what looks 16:9. Why can’t it just take the whole photo?

I’ve had success making columns on other pages, I had one pretty much all together just had to lower the right column one line and now everything is all messed up. I’ve tried starting over from scratch and I still can’t get it to work. Basically everything won’t go past the first half, even though I coded it to be to the right of that half it still sticks to the left?

I’ve had other issues but this is what’s stopped all my progress, and of course my bosses are anxious to get this thing up this week.