Newbie trying to customize template, need help!

Hi, I’m making a site using the WP Gold theme (https://demo.wp-magazine.se/) and I’m trying to customize it a bit. I’m brand new to WordPress and themes and have never done this before so please bear with me. What I have so far is here…

https://nezane.org/wordpress/

Here’s what I’d ultimately like to do…

1. At the top, instead of having the area to the left of the search box where is says “Nezane.org, Empowering Zambians in the New England Area”, I’d like to put in a linked Flash banner (468 x 60 px). Is this possible and how would I achieve this? (I already have the banner created, I just need to know how to drop it in).
2. Where it says News right now below the nav bar, I’d like to have that a Featured Content Gallery where it would pull a batch of photos in a slideshow. I’d still like to have the right side have the Sports. Can anyone let me know how I’d incorporate this into the theme?
3. According to the instructions on the theme, to pull in the entries in the Sports section at the top I have to change the category ID in the index.php to reflect the choice. Right now the category is set to 3. I’m assuming that when I create the Sports page I have to somehow give all the entries a category of 3 for it to work. How would I do this?
4. In the area down towards the bottom where it says “Golden Tags” (I’m not even sure what this means), I’d like to change it to “Advertisments” and have 4 jpg banners (250 x 250 px) in a row. Can this be done and how?

Any and all help is greatly appreciated, thanks so much!