Issue with the loop, challenge for help

OK, this one is going to take some explaining; it’s very tricky because I don’t know where the problem arises.

So I’ve been toying around with the loop to make a sort of WP driven CMS. That way all the contributors only need to enter a post and specify a certain category and the post will go to a certain area on the main page.

Now this layout is very rough, but if you check out https://honestboston.com/Blog , you can see what I mean. All three columns are filled with posts, but the category ID determines what goes where. That was just a template, but it worked.

When I switched over to https://chapelhillvoice.com , however, moved all the files, including exporting the old posts, categories, etc via the WP manage feature, the site stopped working partially.

This is what I find peculiar: Because my strategy relies on including in each column a unique loop.php file that includes and excludes categories using a post query, it should work so long as those category IDs exist, which they do. The middle and right columns do not work, but the left column does.

How can this be when I have changed none of the code or the category IDs? Is there any way it could relate to my switch to a different server?

Thanks so much for any help. I know that was verbose.