Re: Front page Idea – Where do I begin?
Place to begin is in setting up a child theme and master stylesheet, described here in the docs somewhere:
https://codex.buddypress.org/how-to-guides/building-a-buddypress-child-theme/
If you are simply wanting to re-skin the default layout then you essentially set about overridding the default styles called into that child theme stylesheet. You will need to find the rulesets that govern the content area and sidebar and reset the widths stated for them to the values you want. As for the activity stream on the front page then you can do that by setting the reading options of the WP install to front page = ‘Activity Stream’ and creating a blank new page to hold the blog posts
